The Pocket Card in Practice: The Mayor’s Laminated Card
Ruth is the mayor of a town of nine thousand in German-speaking Switzerland — the kind of town where the Tuesday market matters, the commune assembly still votes by raised hand, and the mayor’s office answers its own phone. Which is why the vendors love her calendar: in eighteen months she has been pitched a smart-parking system, an AI chatbot for citizen services, predictive maintenance for the water network, an administrative assistant for the school, and — her personal favorite — an algorithm to optimize the flower planters. Every pitch urgent. Every pitch, in its way, plausible. Notifications flooding her with false urgency is, she notes, no longer only a private condition; it is now a municipal one.
Her instrument for this weather comes from Chapter 13 of the book, and it is the least technical tool in it: the Pocket Card — the four core principles, printed small, carried always. The book suggests laminating it. Ruth, a Swiss administrator to her bones, laminated it the same afternoon and put it in the blazer pocket where other mayors keep reading glasses. When facing any AI decision, the instruction goes, pull it out and consider all four principles before pressure decides for you.
The council meeting about the citizen-services chatbot is the one people in town still mention. The vendor’s countdown was ticking — sign this quarter, lock the pilot pricing. Ruth put the card on the table, literally, and walked the decision through it out loud.
Curiosity — stay willing to be surprised
The obvious answers in the room were two: the enthusiasts’ yes and the skeptics’ no. She instead asked the vendor the question the card trains: what does the system get wrong, and what happened in the towns where it went badly? The answer — honest, to the vendor’s credit — reshaped the pilot’s design.
Intentionality — choose consciously, not by momentum
“The sales quarter is the vendor’s rhythm,” she told the council. “It is not the Gemeinde’s.” The decision moved to after a citizen consultation, at the town’s pace — and survived being called slow, because slowness chosen is not the same as slowness suffered.
Clarity — see what the tool misses
The chatbot’s numbers counted resolved inquiries. The counter clerks’ experience counted something else: the elderly residents who come to the Tuesday counter partly to be seen by someone who knows them. The pilot kept the counter hours untouched — not as a compromise, as a finding.
Care — human flourishing over pure optimization
The success metrics, rewritten by council amendment: problems actually resolved and residents’ reported dignity of service, not calls deflected. “A deflected call,” Ruth told the assembly, “is not a served citizen. It is a citizen you have successfully avoided.”
The pilot ran, modestly and usefully. But the card’s real career has been longer than any one decision. Council members teased her about it for a season — and then, in the way of small institutions, the teasing became vocabulary: what does the card say? is now shorthand in meetings for slow down, all four principles, out loud. Four words — curiosity, intentionality, clarity, care — entered the town’s working language the way durable things enter a town: through one person carrying them, visibly, until they stopped being hers.
The physical card matters — tangible wisdom in a digital world. Ruth’s proof is the laminate’s worn corners. Compasses, she points out, only work if you take them out of the pocket.
Ruth is a composite — drawn from conversations with public officials navigating AI procurement, with details changed. The flower-planter algorithm pitch is real somewhere, guaranteed.
Try it yourself
Print the card — the four principles, arranged like compass points. Laminate it if you want. Put it where you’ll meet it: wallet, laptop, desk, mirror. Before any AI-mediated decision, take it out and ask all four questions out loud, especially the one you’re tempted to skip. Let it redirect you when the pressure mounts; that is not philosophy, it’s navigation.
Comments