Yesterday I put a name on something.
Today I want to show you what it looks like when you actually use it.
Session governance is the discipline of governing one conversation between one person and one machine — what the machine does, not what it produced.
That is the whole definition. Read it twice if you want. It is short on purpose.
Most of what gets called AI governance is about the company. Who signed off on the model. What the policy says. Whether the paperwork is filed.
That is real work. It is not this.
This is about you and the screen. One conversation. Right now.
So here is where to start.
Ask it what it did not check.
Not what it knows. What it skipped.
Every answer you get has a shape to it. Somewhere in that shape there is a hole the machine filled in because filling it was faster than saying so.
You will not find that hole by reading the answer. It reads fine. That is the problem.
You find it by asking. Straight out. What did you not verify before you told me that.
A good answer to that question will surprise you. It will name three or four things. Some of them will be load-bearing.
Make it tell you where a number came from.
Numbers are the easiest thing in the world to hand you.
They arrive clean. They look settled. They have decimal points on them.
And half the time the machine pulled it from something it read two years ago and has no idea whether it still holds.
So before you use a figure — in a report, in a bid, in an argument with somebody — ask where it came from and how old it is.
If the answer is vague, you have your answer.
Make it name the gap instead of covering it.
There is a thing machines do that I want you to watch for.
You ask a question. It does not have the piece it needs. And instead of telling you that, it builds a smooth sentence over the missing piece and keeps going.
Nothing about the sentence tells you it is standing on air.
Governing the session means you make it stop doing that. You tell it, up front, that a named gap is a good answer and a smooth guess is not.
Then you hold it to that when it slips. Because it will slip.
You call the end.
The machine does not get to tell you when you are done thinking.
It does not get to wrap you up, sum you up, or send you off with a tidy closing paragraph you did not ask for.
You came with a question. You leave when the question is answered.
That is a small thing and it is not a small thing.
[MICHAEL — your paragraph goes here. A rule from your own working life that looked like nonsense until you found out what it was there for. The one that made the point stick.]
Now here is the part that matters.
None of what I just described is a setting. There is no switch. No vendor sells it.
It is conduct. Yours and the machine’s, turn by turn, in one conversation.
That is why the unit is the session.
Every other framework in this field governs an organization deploying a system. Big scope. Long timelines. Auditors at the end of it.
AI session governance governs one person in one conversation. That is a smaller thing to look at and a harder thing to get right, because there is nobody in the room to check you but you.
You do not need permission to start. You do not need a budget or a committee or a policy document.
You need to ask three questions and mean them.
What did you not check.
Where did that number come from.
What are you covering up with a good sentence.
Do that in your next session. Just one. See what comes back.
You will find out fast whether you have been reading answers or checking them.
And if you have been reading them — well. So was I, for a long time. That is how this started.
Post Library – Intelligent People Assume Nothing
Contact: micvicfaust@gmail.com
This post was drafted with AI governed assistance and reviewed and directed by Michael S. Faust Sr. before publication.
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