Growth in the Fog
Making decisions when you don't know what you don't know
There’s a difference between uncertainty and ignorance. A difference between not knowing how something will turn out, and not even realizing what outcomes are on the table.
I came across Richard Zeckhauser's work when I heard about Yhprum's Law, which is the opposite of Murphy's Law (Yhprum = Murphy backwards). The simple formula of Yhprum's Law is: everything, that can work, will work.
He wrote this paper 'The anatomy of ignorance'.
It's a great read. Zeckhauser calls the third, most extreme state in the decision-making chain: ignorance. Risk means the outcomes are known and quantifiable. Uncertainty means the outcomes are known but the probabilities aren’t. But with ignorance? You don’t even know what to look for. The possible futures are invisible to you.
"Ignorance represents a situation in which some potential outcomes are not even identified. Often they are both unknown and unknowable." (Zeckhauser & Roy, The Anatomy of Ignorance)
This is the fog most organizations operate in. They create implementation plans before they understand the system. They assign timelines to solutions before surfacing the real constraints. They confuse momentum with clarity.
And it’s not because they’re reckless. It’s because they’re blind to their blindness.
Zeckhauser defines a specific kind of event that arises from this fog: the CAD - the Consequential Amazing Development. It could be an implosion. Or a breakthrough. Either way, it’s the kind of event that blindsides you. Not because it was unpredictable, but because it was unimagined.
In corporate life, CADs look like this:
- A vendor solution creates new dependencies no one saw coming.
- A cross-functional initiative fails, not due to effort, but because everyone was optimizing for different truths.
- A workaround quietly delivers results for months before someone asks, "Wait, why does this even work?"
The root cause isn’t bad execution. It’s unacknowledged ignorance.
I’ve seen this firsthand. At one point, we were weeks into a major implementation, deep in execution, before someone finally asked a basic question about how the system was actually supposed to be used. And suddenly, it was obvious: no one really knew. Everyone had assumptions. Everyone thought someone else had done the foundational discovery work. We hadn’t. The initiative wasn’t doomed because of poor execution, in fact, quite the opposite; the teams were sharp. It faltered because we launched before understanding what we were really solving for.
It’s a lesson I’ve seen play out more than once: when outcomes start slipping, people double down on delivery. But the issue isn’t speed. It’s direction. If you skip the work of seeing the system, you build on top of ignorance. And it shows up later, in missed handoffs, rework, delays, and post-mortems that blame people instead of asking better questions.
So what do you do when you’re in the fog?
You don’t panic. You don’t pretend to see clearly. You start the beginner's mind.
- Acknowledge ignorance as a starting condition.
- Don’t treat ambiguity as something to eliminate. Treat it as something to explore.
- Delay decisioning until you’ve discovered the terrain.
- Do the discovery work. Watch the system. Observe the real flows. Don’t anchor on slide decks.
- Look for emergent order.
- Something is working, even if it shouldn’t. Why? Reverse-engineer the resilience before you try to optimize it.
- Name the CADs.
- Ask: "What could blindside us? What outcome would we be amazed by, both in a good or bad way?"
- If no one can answer, that’s a signal. You’re operating in true ignorance.
- Preserve the tension.
- The job isn’t to escape the fog too quickly. It’s to learn to navigate within it. That means resisting the urge to force certainty.
The point isn’t to have perfect foresight. That’s a fantasy. The point is to become the kind of leader who notices when visibility drops, and adjusts accordingly.
When you’re building new systems, launching go-to-market motions, or trying to scale something that worked in a one-off case, you're walking into terrain where you don't know what you don't know.
The good news is: with the right posture, that terrain becomes navigable. You learn to sense the fog. Slow down. Listen more. Test more. And design with humility.
That’s how you grow inside the unknown.
That’s how you avoid the CADs you never saw coming.
KB