Through the Fog – How to Think When the Rules Stop Working

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“The enemy of strategy is not volatility. It’s false clarity.” (Martin Reeves, BCG Henderson Institute)

In strategy sessions and boardrooms, complexity often wears the mask of chaos.
But not all chaos is created equal. Some forms of chaos are triggered by macroeconomic shifts or political shocks sudden, external forces that ripple across industries. Others emerge from within, when internal systems break down under the weight of poor design, weak processes, or misaligned strategy. Leaders must distinguish between systemic failure and singular incidents, between internal weaknesses and external shocks. Corporate transformation, while necessary, is one of the most vulnerable periods for companies. It often initiates a period of heightened exposure, as leadership attempts to impose new systems or directions while the organization is still adapting. These are what I refer to as Situations of Rapid Change (SRC). “Situations of Rapid Change” (SRC) are instants in the lifecycle of a firm when the dynamics of a transformation process exceed the capabilities of the organisation to adapt. These can be triggered by the voluntary initiation of an irreversible transformation process, or be forced from outside, through disruptive changes in the economic environment. SRC are paralleled by adverse changes of the economic status of the firm.

Let’s make sense of this.

Dissecting the Nature of Chaos

Chaos wears many faces. There are moments when things move too fast to grasp and we are pulled into rapid change. This is the realm of volatility. At other times, the issue lies in a lack of information. We cannot confidently predict what might happen next because we simply do not know. That is uncertainty. Then there are situations that are intricate by nature. Everything connects to everything else, with multiple variables interacting in unpredictable ways. This is complexity. And finally, there are scenarios where even with information, interpretation is difficult. Signals contradict each other. Language fails. This is ambiguity.

These four types are captured under the acronym VUCA, coined by the U.S. Army War College in the late 1980s to describe the strategic conditions after the Cold War:

• Volatility: The nature and speed of change are unpredictable. The challenge is unexpected instability rather than lack of knowledge.
• Uncertainty: There is a lack of clarity about present conditions and future outcomes. While information may exist, it is incomplete or unreliable.
• Complexity: Multiple interconnected variables create cause-and-effect relationships that are difficult to untangle. There are too many moving parts for a single correct answer.
• Ambiguity: Situations where interpretation is unclear. The challenge lies in not knowing how to understand or frame the problem.

Some disruptions are shaped not just by structural forces, but by their psychological impact. The BANI model, introduced by futurist Jamais Cascio, stands for Brittle, Anxious, Nonlinear, and Incomprehensible. It serves as a complement to VUCA, placing focus not only on the nature of disruption, but on how individuals and systems react to it under sustained pressure.

• Brittle: Structures that appear solid but collapse suddenly when strained. Think of an overleveraged balance sheet or an overstretched logistics system.
• Anxious: Environments where people are emotionally overwhelmed, leading to indecision, burnout, and an erosion of confidence.
• Nonlinear: A breakdown in predictability, where small inputs can produce disproportionately large consequences.
• Incomprehensible: Situations where outcomes defy logic and where cause and effect cannot be meaningfully mapped.

BANI is especially relevant in the post pandemic world and in AI driven business environments, where leaders must navigate both technical uncertainty and psychological fatigue.

Finally, Black Swan events, a term coined by Nassim Nicholas Taleb in his 2007 book of the same name, refer to highly improbable, high-impact occurrences that are only understood in hindsight. The 2008 financial crisis, the COVID-19 pandemic, or the sudden collapse of major institutions fall into this category. Black Swans challenge the idea of predictability itself and expose the fragility of tightly coupled systems.

Recognizing whether you are dealing with a volatile trend, a brittle structure, an anxious team, or a true statistical anomaly is the precondition for any meaningful response.

One of the most comprehensive tools to classify such situations is the Cynefin Framework, developed by Dave Snowden at IBM in 1999. Cynefin (pronounced kuh-nev-in) helps leaders distinguish the nature of the context they are facing before deciding how to act. It defines five domains:

• Clear: Cause and effect are obvious and well understood. Best practices apply. Suitable for routine operations with predictable outcomes.
• Complicated: A correct solution exists but requires analysis or expert knowledge. Multiple good practices may be valid. Applicable in areas like diagnostics or technical engineering.
• Complex: Cause and effect are only clear in hindsight. Patterns emerge from interactions, not planning. Leaders must probe, sense, and respond. Innovation and culture change fall here.
• Chaotic: No perceivable patterns exist. Immediate stabilizing action is necessary before any analysis can take place. Crisis response fits here.
• Confused: The context is unclear and must first be classified into one of the other four domains.

When operating in the Confused domain, the priority is to determine which of the other four applies.

Cynefin is a sense-making model. It prevents leaders from applying overly simplistic logic to situations that require adaptive thinking. In this way, it complements frameworks like VUCA and BANI by offering a more operational classification system for strategic response.

Choosing the Right Framework for the Terrain

Strategic frameworks are not interchangeable tools. They are lenses. The right one reveals the pattern; the wrong one distorts it. Below we examine key frameworks and clarify when, how, and why to apply them.

Scenario Planning

Scenario planning helps to imagine and prepare for multiple plausible futures. Pioneered at Shell in the 1970s, Scenario Planning became a structured method to explore and rehearse different outcomes based on strategic uncertainties. It is not about prediction but anticipation. It is useful when uncertainty is high, and the drivers of change are outside your control. The aim is not to get it right, but to avoid being surprised.

Sensemaking

Developed by organizational theorist Karl Weick, Sensemaking describes the process by which people construct meaning in uncertain or ambiguous environments. When facts are conflicting and stakes are high, leaders must help teams frame reality before acting. Sensemaking transforms confusion into collective action.

A clear example is a leadership team responding to a sudden reputational crisis triggered by social media backlash. The information is partial, the threat is real, and internal alignment is fragmented. Instead of rushing to react or waiting for full clarity, the leader convenes key stakeholders, reviews what is known, surfaces assumptions, and constructs a working narrative: what is happening, what it means, and what should guide the next steps. This shared story becomes the basis for coordinated communication, risk containment, and forward movementeven if the facts are still evolving.

Adaptive Strategy

Popular in digital and entrepreneurial environments, Adaptive Strategy abandons long term fixed planning in favor of continuous iteration and responsiveness. It is grounded in agile principles and emphasizes quick feedback loops, real time learning, and incremental adjustments over static goal setting. This approach is particularly relevant in markets where conditions evolve faster than traditional planning cycles allow, such as technology, consumer platforms, and early stage innovation. Instead of betting on a single strategic roadmap, leaders run multiple controlled experiments, gather data, and adjust based on what works. It is effective where volatility is high and learning speed becomes a competitive advantage.

Strategic Resilience

Resilience is more than recovery. It is the ability to absorb disturbance and maintain function. Strategic Resilience involves redundant capabilities, diversified supply chains, modular business models, and leadership agility. It is essential in complex systems with recurrent shocks. This concept gained prominence after the 2001 attacks and again during the COVID crisis.

Antifragility

Proposed by Nassim Nicholas Taleb as a contrast to resilience, Antifragility refers to systems that benefit from disorder rather than merely resisting it. While resilient systems return to their original state after a shock, antifragile ones evolve and strengthen because of the disruption. Taleb originally developed the concept in the context of financial markets and biological systems, but it has powerful relevance in organizational strategy.

In practice, antifragility shows up in decentralized structures, redundant pathways, and cultures that treat failure as a learning mechanism rather than a threat. For example, in a venture capital portfolio, individual startup failures are expected and even necessary, as the insights and returns from a few successful bets more than compensate for the losses. Similarly, innovation-driven companies may intentionally create pressure through time-bound experiments or customer feedback cycles that expose weak assumptions early.

Antifragility is most applicable in environments with continuous volatility, high information asymmetry, or exposure to non-linear returns. It is a mindset shift from planning for stability to designing for stress.

Fog of War

The concept of Fog of War originates from the writings of Prussian military theorist Carl von Clausewitz, who used it to describe the uncertainty experienced by participants in military operations. The term captures the difficulty of making informed decisions with limited or contradictory information., Fog of War describes situations where leaders must act despite incomplete, contradictory, or rapidly changing information. It refers to the confusion and uncertainty experienced on the battlefield, where visibility is low, communication is unreliable, and decisions must be made in real time. In a corporate context, this applies during fast-moving crises such as cyberattacks, public scandals, or geopolitical disruptions that affect operations across borders.

What makes Fog of War distinctive is that the traditional decision loop (observe, orient, decide, act) is severely compressed. There is no time for perfect data or thorough consensus. Instead, leadership relies on clarity of intent, decisive action, and trusted delegation. Preparation comes not from static plans but from drilled responses, strong communication discipline, and shared mental models.

The lesson here is that under pressure, instinct is not enough. Competence must be trained, and systems must be designed to function when the rules stop working.

Why the Best Tactics Come From the Front Lines

Most essential skills for managing complexity are not taught in business schools. They are learned in environments where failure is immediate. Military units, firefighters, emergency responders, and trauma surgeons have developed the most reliable protocols for operating in uncertainty. Not to eliminate it, but to operate within it.

My early training as a paratrooper taught me to lead in environments where plans collapse, tools malfunction, and communication is unreliable. That same readiness is what organizations need in moments of transformation or distress. It is not about knowing more. It is about knowing what matters when you know less.

The value of these front-line models lies not in their origin, but in their relevance. They do not promise control. They deliver clarity of action when it is most needed.

Complexity Is Not the Problem. Misreading It Is.

Executives do not fail because things got too complex. They fail because they used the wrong map. Or worse, they stuck to one even when the ground changed beneath them.

To navigate complexity today, you need more than models. You need mental agility, emotional containment, and practical readiness. Complexity is not the enemy. It is the terrain. And we cannot flatten the terrain. We must learn to move through it.