Research proposal, April 2026 (summary)

This is a summary of the research proposal I submitted to Warwick Business School in April 2026, the starting point of my doctoral research. It is a summary, not the original text: wording is shortened and one citation is given with its corrected year.

The title

Architecting Resilience: A Governance Maturity Model for AI-Resilient Decision-Making in Global Matrix Organisations.

The problem

Executives decide on the basis of information that reaches them through many hands and systems. Generative AI makes it cheap to fabricate convincing audio, video and documents and to inject them into those channels. The proposal called this cognitive intrusion: synthetic content placed deliberately into an organisation's information flows to distort the decisions of specific people.

Two findings from the literature shaped the argument. Deepfakes do damage even when they do not deceive, because exposure raises uncertainty and lowers trust in information generally (Vaccari & Chadwick, 2020). And people are poor at telling synthetic from authentic media (Groh et al., 2022), so a defence that relies on employees spotting fakes is weak. Chesney and Citron (2019) set out early what this means for institutional trust.

The proposal argued that established security frameworks protect the infrastructure through which information flows, not the authenticity of the information itself, and that this leaves a governance gap.

Where the idea came from

In 2011 I co-wrote an MBA thesis that designed a geo-social news platform, yuKast (Wilsmann & Kurtin, 2011). Its core was a way to judge whether user-submitted news was authentic: metadata from the device, ratings from other users, and a reputation score for contributors, combined.

That design assumed the main threat to information was carelessness. Generative AI replaces carelessness with deliberate fabrication at scale. The proposal took the old verification logic and asked what it would look like inside an enterprise.

The research question

How can global matrix organisations architect systemic resilience against AI-enabled cognitive intrusion within their authenticity verification architectures to secure the integrity of strategic decision-making?

The planned approach

The proposal chose Design Science Research (Hevner et al., 2004): build an artefact that solves a practical problem, and evaluate it in use. The artefact was a maturity model with five levels, from ad hoc awareness to adaptive resilience, constructed with the procedure of Becker, Knackstedt and Pöppelbuß (2009).

It planned three phases over three years:

1. Explore. A structured review of documented incidents and interviews with senior security and risk executives.
2. Design. Build the maturity model and refine it with an expert panel in two rounds.
3. Evaluate. Apply the model in three to four organisations and pilot a training programme based on inoculation theory (McGuire, 1964; Traberg, Roozenbeek & van der Linden, 2022).

Two ideas framed the whole: that organisations make sense of their environment through the information they receive (Weick, 1995), and that this threat is a case of uncertainty in Knight's (1921) sense, where the kinds of attack are known but their probability cannot be calculated.

Sources

• Becker, J., Knackstedt, R. & Pöppelbuß, J. (2009). Developing maturity models for IT management. Business & Information Systems Engineering, 1(3), 213–222.
• Chesney, R. & Citron, D. (2019). Deep fakes: A looming challenge for privacy, democracy, and national security. California Law Review, 107(6), 1753–1820.
• Groh, M., Epstein, Z., Firestone, C. & Picard, R. (2022). Deepfake detection by human crowds, machines, and machine-informed crowds. PNAS, 119(1), e2110013119. PMC
• Hevner, A. R., March, S. T., Park, J. & Ram, S. (2004). Design science in information systems research. MIS Quarterly, 28(1), 75–105.
• Knight, F. H. (1921). Risk, uncertainty and profit. Hart, Schaffner & Marx.
• McGuire, W. J. (1964). Inducing resistance to persuasion: Some contemporary approaches. Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 1, 191–229.
• Traberg, C. S., Roozenbeek, J. & van der Linden, S. (2022). Psychological inoculation against misinformation: Current evidence and future directions. Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 700(1), 136–151.
• Vaccari, C. & Chadwick, A. (2020). Deepfakes and disinformation: Exploring the impact of synthetic political video on deception, uncertainty, and trust in news. Social Media + Society, 6(1).
• Weick, K. E. (1995). Sensemaking in organizations. SAGE.
• Wilsmann, D. & Kurtin, M. (2011). Development and discussion of a competitive business concept in the field of geo-social networks: Using the example of yuKast, a news network. Unpublished MBA thesis, Düsseldorf Business School, Heinrich-Heine-Universität Düsseldorf.