The Rules of Thumb in Practice · Landscape: the course

All courses / Landscape / Module 4 / Chapter 19

Learning objectives

After the lesson the participant can:

State the nine rules of thumb and the instinct each answers.
Select the rule that fits the word or figure in a document that triggers an instinct.
Rewrite a paragraph about AI so that it names units, levels, seats and baselines and labels its projections.
Apply the nine questions in order to a real document before a decision is taken on it.

Key concepts

The nine rules as questions: Which ones, and how many; at which level, for which action; used for what and deployed by whom; what bent the last curve; what base rate and what quiet harm; divided by what; what was decided, by whom, and what would reverse it; what the other two chairs see; who held the seat.
The trigger word: Each reader begins with the rule that fits the word that triggered an instinct: the AI, automated, our model, a dashed line, a frightening story, a lone count, rogue, a paper from one chair, a culprit.
A paper a board could act on: Rewritten with the rules applied, the board paper's first paragraph names three units at stated levels, seats and baselines, says which allocation function is under reassessment and makes no projection. It is longer, and the first version a board could act on.
The honest sentence: The journalist's sentence that names the gap: the incident count rose from 313 for 2024 to 463 for 2025, and whether the rate did, nobody can say from these figures, because no public dataset counts deployments.
The seat's question at work: The rule the citizen can act on: who decides when a device allocates a shift or scores a quarter, and who can be asked to decide otherwise.

Interactive exercises

Do them here and get feedback at once. Choose a card and then where it belongs, or drag it.

Interactive exercise 1 · Match

Instinct and rule of thumb

Pair each instinct with the rule of thumb its chapter arrived at, as Chapter 19 quotes them.

Interactive exercise 2 · Scenario

Open shifts without approval

Read the situation and choose when the architect should approve, following the architect's scene in the chapter.

Teaching plan

15 min	Recall: participants write the nine rules from memory, then check them against the chapter's list, each with its measured fact. The teacher shows the table that maps the fourteen questions to chapters.
25 min	The teacher walks through the executive's and the architect's scenes: three sentences of a board paper taken apart rule by rule, and a rise from Level 2 to Level 3 made conditional on the diamond, the baseline and the reversibility test.
15 min	Groups of three take the public official, the journalist and the citizen. Each reads its scene and reports which rules were used, in which order, and the sentence the reader ends with.
40 min	Exercise: participants put the nine questions to a real document and rewrite its opening paragraph.
10 min	Closing: which rule each organisation most needs. Hansa Mutual the ninth; Nordvik Region the fifth and the seventh. Each participant names the one their own organisation most needs.

Discussion

The rewritten board paper is longer. What does a board lose and gain when the first paragraph names three units at stated levels and seats where it used to say the AI is automated?
The councillor's fear was not foolish; it was about the wrong mark. How can an official answer a frightening question in a way that redirects attention without dismissing it?
The citizen's survey, read from the other chairs, gives figures the headline left out. Which of the figures in that scene would you want beside the headline, and why?

Written exercise

Exercise · 40 minutes

Nine questions for one document

Bring a real document about AI that is waiting for a decision or a reaction in your organisation: a board paper, a proposal, a council question, a press release or a news article. Mark every trigger word or figure in it. Put the nine questions to it in the order the chapters set them and write a one-line answer to each, or write that the document does not say. Where the document describes a landscape without drawing it, sketch the units it mentions as marks on the grid. Then rewrite its opening paragraph so that it names the units, their levels, seats and baselines, gives every number its denominator and source, and labels any statement about the future as observable, expected or speculation.

Deliverable: The annotated document, nine one-line answers, a hand sketch of the units it mentions, and a rewritten opening paragraph with labelled statements about the future.

Your work

Self-test

Choose an answer to see whether it is right, or open the answer below each question.

In the executive's scene, the board paper says the AI is now automated across claims handling in all markets. What does the second rule find?
Show the answer
C. That it is true of routing, false of settlement and misleading about drafting
The two assistants sit at Level 1 Assisted and draft. The claims-triage agent sits at Level 3 Bounded for routing and allocating a claim and at Level 0 Advisory for settling one. Automated is five answers, not one.
How does the regional director answer the question whether the Region's rogue AI could decide about a resident's benefits without a person?
Show the answer
A. No system decides about a resident's benefits; one orders the queue in which people decide
The benefits-triage system sits at Level 0 Advisory: it ranks the queue by urgency and caseworkers decide every case. The Region runs no Mode 5 agent. The quiet harm is a ranking that deprioritises the wrong people, and the seat above the mark reads 2.
A press release says 463 AI incidents were recorded in 2025, up from 313 in 2024, and that the trend is accelerating. What does the fourth rule say about the second claim?
Show the answer
D. That two points do not make a trend; what bent the curve is partly adoption, partly attention and partly editorial throughput
Two points, 313 and 463, do not make a trend. The counts are real, but earlier years keep rising as reports arrive, adoption rose in the same period, and there is no count of deployments to divide by.