One of the four fogs.
No one outside a small room — and possibly no one inside it — knows what a world leader’s next move is, what a regulator is actually weighing, or how a market will absorb a shock. The commentary, the analysis, the confident forecasting: these are navigational instruments being used in fog. They reduce anxiety. They do not reduce the fog.
The organisations that act as if the external world is fully legible are not better informed than those that admit it is not. They are just more committed to the performance of certainty. And that performance has a cost: it forecloses the kinds of navigation that are only possible when you acknowledge you are working in conditions of genuine opacity.
This matters because most strategic planning is implicitly built on the assumption that the external environment is sufficiently knowable to plan for. When it isn’t — and it usually isn’t, at the timescales that matter — the plan is not a map of reality. It is a commitment to a particular story about reality that may need revising faster than the planning cycle allows.
The response to external opacity is not better forecasting. It is building the capacity to sense and respond — systems that can detect when the story is no longer fitting and adjust without requiring the whole strategy to be rebuilt from scratch. This is part of what moving from optimised to resilient actually means in practice.