The Luddite Consultant
A handrail for readers encountering the book's distinctive vocabulary for the first time.
You do not need to master these terms before reading. Use this page when a word interrupts the journey, then return to the paragraph that brought you here. The purpose is orientation, not reduction.
Antenarrative is the living, unfinished material from which more settled stories are made: fragments, competing accounts, half-formed possibilities, and voices that have not yet been gathered into one official version.
Why it matters here: AI transformation is often presented as a finished success story before its human and ecological consequences are known.
Answerability is the obligation to give an account to people affected by one's actions—and to remain open to their questions, evidence, and demands for repair. It is more than public relations or consultation.
Why it matters here: When a system shifts costs onto workers or communities, someone must be able to answer for that decision.
Hidden costs are the labor, resources, harms, and future obligations left outside a narrow calculation of efficiency or profit. They do not disappear because a business case fails to count them.
Why it matters here: The book asks readers to look behind a smooth promise of automation for what—and who—makes it possible.
Qualimetrics places qualitative stories, quantitative patterns, and financial evidence in conversation. It resists allowing one number to stand in for the full meaning of a human life or community future.
Why it matters here: It provides a way to examine AI claims without treating a dashboard as the whole truth.
SEAM is a socio-economic approach to organizational change. It connects everyday work and human experience with economic consequences, including costs that conventional accounting often leaves unseen.
Why it matters here: SEAM helps ask how change affects work, learning, time, health, and the wider social fabric—not only financial results.
Storying is the ongoing activity of making, revising, contesting, and living stories. A story is not simply a report of what happened; it can shape what becomes possible next.
Why it matters here: Consulting and AI are not only technologies and policies. They are also stories that organize attention, responsibility, and action.
A composite witness is a fictional character carefully made from recurring patterns in real experiences. The form protects individual identities while making a broader organizational reality visible.
Why it matters here: Sarah Calder, Nell Hart, and Rafael Ortiz are invitations to inquiry; they are not portraits of particular employees.