Theory Audit — Field Note 01: Decision Fog

A systematic audit of 74 papers across six research domains to determine whether Decision Fog can be distinguished from existing explanations.

Research domains reviewed

• Folder A — Information Overload and Cognitive Load (Papers 1–12): Miller (1956) through Kashlot et al. (2026). Explains demand-capacity mismatch. Residual: the criterion by which demands are converted into decision weight.
• Folder B — Organisational Attention and Attentional Selection (Papers 13–24): Ocasio (1997) through Ocasio (2025). Explains how structures and communication channel attention. Residual: quality of consequence-sensitive discrimination among attended issues.
• Folder C — Bounded Rationality and Organisational Decision Processes (Papers 25–36): Simon (1955) through Wan & Chih (2024). Explains stopping rules, recycling and unstructured choice. Residual: a prior perceptual change before indecision or conflict appears.
• Folder D — Sensemaking, Equivocality, and Strategic Issue Diagnosis (Papers 37–48): Dutton et al. (1983) through Whittle et al. (2023). Explains cue extraction and meaning construction under ambiguity. Residual: cross-decision erosion without a trigger or genuine increase in equivocality.
• Folder E — Group Information Processing and Workplace Meetings (Papers 49–61): Janis (1972) through Schirmer et al. (2026). Explains shared-information bias, meeting dysfunction and confidence gaps. Residual: an organisation-level condition persisting beyond distributed knowledge or poor facilitation.
• Folder F — Compensatory Work, Collective Mindfulness, and Concealed Deterioration (Papers 62–74): Turner (1976) through Degerman & Wallo (2024). Explains how competent adaptation preserves output while concealing weakness. Residual: the content of the specific decision-relevance degradation being concealed.

Audit conclusion

The theory audit does not establish Decision Fog as a distinct causal mechanism. It does establish that the observation is not already named by any single existing construct. The combination of relevance flattening, recursive coordination and compensated continuity constitutes a theoretically coherent and partially evidenced configuration. Current evidential status: D — Integrative condition; no distinct mechanism established. Confidence: Medium.