Mechanism Analysis — Field Note 01: Decision Fog

A Field Note is an observation. A Mechanism Analysis is an investigation. The purpose of this page is not to defend the idea, but to determine whether it deserves to exist as a distinct concept.

Verdict: D — Integrative condition; no distinct mechanism established

Decision Fog provisionally names the interval in which an organisation is still producing decisions, but its attention system has become less able to preserve differences in material consequence — and competence is absorbing the evidence of that loss.

The observed pattern

In an apparently functioning organisation with capable people and adequate data, inputs that differ materially in their effect on an outcome begin receiving increasingly similar decision weight, causing analysis and coordination to expand while skilled participants conceal the deterioration by keeping work moving.

The proposed sequence

attention claims multiply → salience cues influence routing → decision weight becomes less sensitive to causal consequence → search and alignment expand → decisions recycle → capable actors compensate → visible failure is delayed

10 competing explanations tested

  1. Information overload — explains demand-capacity mismatch; does not explain the criterion used to rank relevance.
  2. Collective attention overload (Barros & Ramos 2025) — very close; residual is the diagnostic threshold where overload becomes relevance flattening.
  3. The attention-based view — explains how structures channel attention; residual is the quality of discrimination among attended issues.
  4. Quality of organisational attention (Weick & Sutcliffe) — explains the distinction between quantity and quality of attention; residual is a gradual ordinary-work pathway whose early effects are concealed by competence.
  5. Strategic issue diagnosis and sensemaking — explains cue extraction and equivocality; residual is cross-decision erosion without a trigger.
  6. Bounded rationality and heuristics — explains stopping rules; residual is deterioration in the ecological validity of those rules.
  7. Garbage-can and escalating-indecision models — explains recycling; residual is a prior perceptual condition in cases without fluid goals or conflict.
  8. Hidden profiles and common knowledge — explains shared-information bias; residual is cases where relevant information is shared but its causal weight is still flattened.
  9. Workplace-meeting research — explains meeting dysfunction; residual is an organisation-level condition persisting beyond any single forum.
  10. Compensatory work and workarounds — explains masking; residual is the specific decision-relevance degradation being concealed.

7 necessary conditions

  1. Baseline shift — the same class of decisions was formerly made more easily.
  2. Adequate informational access — no known missing material fact explains the delay.
  3. No dominant substantive conflict — coalition conflict or unclear authority do not adequately explain difficulty.
  4. Relevance flattening — inputs of unequal consequence receive increasingly similar decision weight.
  5. Recursive coordination load — additional alignment creates new attention claims without narrowing the decision.
  6. Compensated continuity — capable actors keep work moving despite extra burden.
  7. Pre-failure cost signal — decision time, reopening, effort or responsibility concentration rises before outcome failure.