I Didn't Write This. I Thought It.

Every word may not be mine. Every thought is.

THE SITUATION

Years ago I worked with a woman who edited my speeches and columns. She was exceptional at it. I noticed something about the dynamic early: she didn’t capture what I said. She captured what I meant. The words were shaped by her craft. The thinking, the argument, the thing I was actually trying to say — that was mine. I never once felt like the substance had changed, only that it had been stated more precisely than I might have stated it myself. She was, in the best possible sense, an extension of how I think — with a better dictionary and a sharper ear for when a sentence wasn’t quite landing.

I’ve been asked how Bad Call is made. Given the current moment around AI, I want to answer that question directly. The answer is that what I just described — that relationship between thinking and expression — is the closest analogy I have for how this publication works. But the analogy only goes so far, and the part where it breaks down is the part worth explaining carefully.

WHAT ACTUALLY HAPPENS

Bad Call starts with the Decision Distortion Framework — four forces that systematically bend organizational judgment under pressure: noise, bias, accumulation, and incentive misalignment. That framework didn’t come from a single source. It came out of years of watching decisions go wrong in rooms I was in, refined against the thinking in Thinking, Fast and Slow and Noise (Daniel Kahneman), Subtract (Leidy Klotz), and The Tyranny of Metrics (Jerry Muller). Every case is selected, sequenced, and analyzed through that framework — the judgment about what a case is really about, where the distortion chain started, and what the clean version would have looked like, is mine throughout.

The research protocol I’ve developed for this is specific and demanding — two independent sources for every date and dollar figure, strict separation of contemporaneous accounts from retrospective post-mortems, and an explicit call on where the fraud line sits before any analytical frame is proposed. The research brief comes to me before any column is drafted. I review it, push back, ask questions, and challenge the proposed framework sequence until I’m satisfied that what we’ve identified is the real distortion chain, not just the surface narrative.

Then comes the conversation — and this is the part worth being precise about, because it’s the part that determines whose thinking you’re actually reading. My questions about what the research revealed. My read on which distortion entered the chain first and why. My pushback on how the framework applies to this specific case — whether what looks like bias is really noise, whether what looks like accumulation is really an incentive problem dressed as a building decision. That conversation goes deep. It accumulates into something closer to a pile of notes than a brief: my thinking about the case, expressed in real time through the exchange. By the time words are being arranged into sentences, the analytical work is already substantially done. In my voice. Through that back-and-forth.

The AI’s first draft draws directly on that pile. It is giving column form to thinking that is already mine — not generating analysis and handing it to me for approval, but transcribing a conversation into structured prose. I then work through multiple iterations, pushing back hard on anything that doesn’t reflect how I actually read the case, anything that sounds analytical rather than real, anything where the column has described a distortion rather than made you feel its logic from the inside. I don’t accept a draft until I feel like it says what I would say if I were sitting across from you explaining what went wrong and why it matters for your next consequential decision.

The woman who edited my speeches would recognize this process immediately. The instrument is different. The relationship is the same.

CARRYOVER

There is a lot of conversation right now about AI and authorship, and most of it is asking the wrong question. The right question isn’t whether AI touched the words. It’s whether the thinking belongs to the person whose name is on the piece. The case selection is mine. The framework is mine. The judgment about where a distortion chain started and what a clean decision would have looked like is mine. The research protocol that disciplines the brief is mine. The conversation that turns research into analysis is mine. What the AI contributes is what a great editor always contributed — precision, structure, the sentence that lands where my draft of it didn’t quite.

By that standard, what you’re reading in every Bad Call column is mine — expressed more precisely than I might have expressed it on my own, but mine.

The woman who edited my speeches understood that distinction without ever needing to articulate it. She wasn’t the author. She was the instrument through which I said what I meant.

Every word may not be mine. Every thought is.

— RC

Because it always seemed fine at the time.

LFB Holdings offers a free Decision Distortion assessment — 20 questions, immediate results, tailored to your dominant force. Self Assessment

Bad Call publishes every other Tuesday. One decision sequence, dissected without narrative cover. Full analysis for paid subscribers at badcall.ai