When first responders arrive at a medical emergency, they do not improvise. They follow a practised sequence of checks and actions. Those steps are designed to override panic, focus attention, and move people into skilled response. Over time, those sequences are taught as simple mnemonics that can be recalled under pressure.
In organisational life, there is no equivalent for the kind of emergency leaders face in the Fog Zone - moments of high uncertainty and high urgency when it is impossible to see clearly and impossible to wait. These are the moments when leaders must make consequential choices under pressure without the benefit of full information or rehearsed expertise.
The FOG FILTER was created as a leadership analogue to those emergency mnemonics. It offers a small set of steps and questions to pull decision-making away from amygdala hijack and back into a deliberate logic.
The Fog Zone: When Every Leader Becomes an Emergency Responder
The Leadership Challenge Framework describes the Fog Zone as the quadrant where uncertainty and urgency are both high. It is distinct from the Expert Response quadrant.
In Expert Response, emergencies are familiar enough to be careers: firefighters, paramedics, emergency physicians, aviation incident teams, cyber incident responders. The underlying problems are known, the response pathways are practised, and leaders specialise in those events.
The Fog Zone is different. It is not a profession. It is a moment in time that can land on any leader, in any sector, without warning. For example:
- A pandemic emerges and leaders must decide whether to shut down schools or campuses.
- A company’s production halts because new tariffs suddenly cut access to a critical component.
- A research team’s stage-three funding for a cancer trial collapses when a donor goes bankrupt.
- An organisation is suddenly pulled into a political social media storm.
- An industry is hit by a new automation tool that can do most of what its firms provide, faster and cheaper.
Each of these is different in content. What they share is intensity and uncertainty.
Leaders feel responsibility to staff, clients, communities, or patients. The stakes are high, the timeline is compressed, and there is no established playbook. In that combination, anxiety, stress, and pressure narrow thinking. Common reactions include:
- freezing or “turtling” - withdrawing and hoping the moment passes
- acting without forethought because the urgency itself feels intolerable
- losing composure in public, with staff, or with the media
- swinging between over-promising and silence
In physiological terms, these are variations of the fight-flight-freeze response. The FOG FILTER is designed as a way back out of that reflexive mode into a sequence of steady, prefrontal decisions.
The Design: Two Stages, One Discipline
The FOG FILTER has two stages:
FOG - Frame, Orient, Gauge
a way to create enough order to think and act together
FILTER - six questions to test potential moves
a way to decide what to do and how to do it without pretending to have more certainty than exists
The tool does not eliminate uncertainty. It organises attention so leaders can move while learning, rather than react from panic or avoid action altogether.
Stage One: FOG - Frame, Orient, Gauge
The purpose of the first three steps in the FOG FILTER is to provide direction, order, and protection at the moment when the system is most vulnerable to drift, speculation, and fragmentation. In fog conditions, the absence of clear leadership can create a vacuum that accelerates anxiety and undermines coordination.
Frame-Orient-Gauge serves as a stabilization mechanism. It signals that someone is taking responsibility, that there is a process underway, and that the work of making sense of the situation has begun. Human systems rely on authority in moments of crisis; these steps help meet that need without overpromising certainty.
1. Frame
Frame establishes a provisional structure for understanding the situation. It anchors attention and reduces the risk of spiraling narratives.
Leaders:
- articulate what is currently known
- name what remains uncertain
- identify the time horizon that matters immediately
- establish the top priorities guiding early decisions
The frame is not final. It is a first stabilizing point - something people can gather around instead of filling the vacuum with assumptions.
2. Orient
Orient aligns people enough that they can move together, even while clarity is incomplete.
Leaders:
- identify who needs to be part of the central response
- clarify who is monitoring which parts of the system
- establish simple, reliable channels for updates
- set expectations for when and how new information will be shared
Orientation ensures that staff, partners, and, when necessary, the public know where coordination sits and how information will flow. It reduces drift and prevents parallel, conflicting responses.
3. Gauge
Gauge is the moment where leaders take stock of where the system is under the greatest strain and where early attention is most needed. It plays a role analogous to triage in emergency response: identifying what must be addressed first because delay would cause irreversible or cascading damage.
Leaders:
- look for forms of deterioration that may not yet be visible but are accelerating
- identify which relationships, processes, or functions cannot be allowed to fracture
- distinguish between noise and true signals of risk
- scan for pressure points where a small move now could prevent significant harm later
- assess the system’s current capacity - who is overloaded, what structures are brittle, where existing routines are breaking down
Gauge provides the early prioritization required to stabilize the situation. It focuses attention on what must not be neglected in the first hours or days of a fog-zone moment, allowing leaders to act in ways that protect the system while clarity develops.
Stage Two: FILTER - Testing Potential Moves
Once a basic picture has been formed, leaders face the core Fog Zone challenge: deciding whether to act, when to act, and how to act, without pretending to know more than they do.
The FILTER provides six questions that any proposed move should pass through:
- F - Fast
- I - Inaction is worse
- L - Learn
- T - Trust
- E - Enable
- R - Reversible
The aim is to pull the brain into a structured conversation before committing scarce attention, reputation, or resources.
F - Fast: Is speed essential in this case?
This question asks whether delay will allow harm, cost, or fragmentation to grow.
- Will waiting make the situation harder to stabilise?
- Is there a risk of losing critical options if action is postponed?
If speed is truly essential, that affects how much time can be spent refining the frame before moving.
I - Inaction is worse: What happens if we do nothing right now?
Fog can produce hesitation. Leaders may wait for clarity that does not come.
This test asks whether inaction itself is a decision with significant downside:
- Will silence be read as indifference or confusion?
- Will people fill the gap with their own assumptions?
- Is something deteriorating that will be harder to repair later?
If doing nothing is likely to worsen the situation, that strengthens the case for making a move, even if that move is limited in scope.
L - Learn: What will this move teach, even if it is only partially successful?
In the Fog Zone, action is also inquiry.
Leaders ask:
- What hypothesis does this move test?
- What can be observed about how people respond?
- What data will this generate that is not available now?
A move that reveals something important about how the system behaves under strain has added value. A move that produces no new insight carries more risk.
T - Trust: How will this move affect trust?
Trust is often under pressure in fog conditions. The way leaders act and communicate can either reinforce or erode the belief that they are paying attention and acting with care.
Questions here include:
- How will affected groups interpret this move?
- Does it align with stated values and past commitments?
- Does it transparently acknowledge uncertainty where it exists?
A move that significantly damages trust usually requires a very high threshold of necessity.
E - Enable: Does this move create more room for future action?
Some actions preserve options, strengthen relationships, or add capability. Others lock the system into a narrow path.
Leaders consider:
- Will this move expand or shrink the choices available later?
- Does it free up resources, capacity, or information?
- Does it keep critical infrastructure or partnerships intact?
When conditions are foggy, preference is given to moves that enlarge the space for later, better-informed decisions.
R - Reversible: Can this move be adjusted or undone?
Reversibility recognizes that fog conditions are dynamic.
Leaders ask:
- If this turns out to be the wrong call, can it be corrected?
- What would unwinding this decision require?
- Can the move be staged so that commitment increases only as clarity increases?
In situations of deep uncertainty, high-irreversibility actions require extremely strong justification.
Why the FOG FILTER
Fog Zone moments compress time and raise stakes while reducing clarity. In that combination, instinct is unreliable.
FOG FILTER provides the minimum structure required to:
- steady the system
- prevent contradictory action
- think under pressure
- move without pretending to have certainty
- preserve options while learning
- maintain trust during highly visible moments
It does not produce perfect decisions. It produces leaders who can still lead when the conditions for good decision-making are least available.