Circuit Breakers & Governance
This edition highlights the fast pace of AI adoption and the chaos of unclear governance and decision-making.
One signal 🔭
One prompt 🧠
One subtraction opportunity ➖
Created by Sam Rogers · Powered by Snap Synapse
🔭 Signal: AI initiatives are moving faster than their organizations can
AI adoption is accelerating. No surprise there. But while AI tools multiply, the decision rights, governance structures, and coordination mechanisms around them lag behind.
Everyone’s trying to “make use” of AI, but many orgs haven’t yet decided who decides key elements about it.
- Who owns the outcomes of AI-assisted decisions?
- Who reviews risks before deployment?
- Who tracks the downstream impacts on process, on performance, on people?
Most folks are duct-taping together their own team's answers out of necessity. And leadership? Often doing the same thing in parallel, but from a different perspective.
Ever tried to get clean the duct tape off of something once it's on? It's a sticky situation at best.
🧠 Strategic Prompt
Where is AI changing the rules faster than your systems can handle?
Try narrowing it down:
- Where are decisions being made without clear owners?
- Where is automation subtly redefining success metrics?
- What workflows now rely on AI but were never designed for it?
➖ Suggested Subtraction
🧽 Scrub out one pseudo-policy.
Ah pseudo-policy, also known as shadow policy. You know the kind: the strategy slide deck that “explains” your AI use case, but that never made it to the Operations team.
The shared doc that's labeled “draft” but that’s been live for six months.
Find one artifact like this that’s pretending to be governance and get real with it.
1. Replace it with something official (most value, most time & effort)
2. Archive it (simple & sneaky temp fix)
3. Tag it as “not current” and circulate that clarification (turn up the tension)
You can’t steer clearly with phantom frameworks in the way. Neither can anyone else.
⚡️Analogy of the Week: AI Circuit Breakers
Most teams adopting AI aren’t empowered, they’re overloaded.
Think of your org as a house wired for a certain voltage.
Every new AI tool is like plugging in another high-draw appliance. Individually, pretty safe and totally manageable. But don't plug in too many at once! Collectively, they will trip the system.
It’s not that any AI is too powerful. It’s that the internal decisioning infrastructure of those who evaluate, govern, and integrate was never designed for this level of power.
What protects a house from the power running through it isn’t just in the wiring. It’s circuit breakers. These switches flip to express the intentional design limits and prevent cascading failure when those limits are exceeded with one hair dryer too many.
Do you know where your organizational circuit breakers are?
*Or are you just hoping the lights will stay on as more AI appliances plug in?*
🧭 Closing Note
Signals & Subtractions is here to help you catch critical inflection points before they harden into dysfunction.
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Until next time,
Sam Rogers
Strategic Subtractor
Snap Synapse