Emergency, Technical, Adaptive or Fog: The Four Kinds of Leadership Challenge

Over the past year, many of the leaders I work with have told me this is the hardest moment they have ever led through. When we dig into what makes it so hard, it often turns out that several different kinds of challenges have landed on their desk at once, and they are taking the same approach with all of them.

Ron Heifetz gave us the distinction between technical problems, which existing expertise can solve, and adaptive challenges, which ask people to change their values, habits or ways of working. My own practice is built on it. The distinction leaves out one thing that matters enormously in practice, and that is time. A culture change and a ransomware attack are both full of uncertainty. You cannot lead them the same way, because one gives you months and the other gives you hours.

Two questions

The Leadership Challenge Framework adds urgency to Heifetz's distinction and maps every challenge against two questions.

How uncertain is it? This covers both the problem and the solution. Do you know what is actually happening and what is driving it? Is there a tested way to fix it, or will people have to learn their way forward?

How urgent is it? This is about how quickly the consequences unfold if nobody acts. Urgency decides how much time you have to learn and how carefully your first moves have to be chosen.

Put the two together and you get four kinds of challenge.

The four challenges

Low uncertainty, time to planTechnical: Expert Delivery

In these cases, the problem is understood and so is the solution. For example, building an airport, developing software, and running an accounting department or a manufacturing line all sit within this group. A leader's work is to plan thoroughly, follow proven methods, clarify roles, sequence the steps and ensure quality. The risks in this zone are scope drift, complacency, and unexplained complexity. New managers primarily deal with these types of challenges.

Low uncertainty, high urgencyEmergency Response

With these challenges the answer is known and the clock is running. This can include firefighting, emergency medicine, search and rescue and cybersecurity incident response. The content of the work looks like Expert Delivery, at a far faster tempo and with far higher stakes. The leader's job is to let trained experts act quickly, clear obstacles out of their way, make fast and clear decisions and keep communication tight. Hesitation, confusion about who decides, and extra layers of consultation can cause real harm in these cases.

High uncertainty, time to learnAdaptive

In these situations the problem, solution or both are still unclear, however you have time to learn. These challenges can include organizational transformation, building climate resilience, entering a new market and redesigning a service model. All of which are adaptive. The nature of these problems means that making progress requires people to change values, habits or roles. As a result, someone is usually experiencing loss. In there a leader's job lies.

Heifetz puts it best: leadership is disappointing your own people at a rate they can absorb. The leader frames what is at stake, brings in perspectives from different parts of the system, surfaces competing readings of the problem, runs small experiments and paces the pressure so that people stay engaged without becoming overwhelmed.

High uncertainty, high urgencyFog

At times like this, the situation itself is unclear and the consequences are arriving fast. For example, Early COVID, a ransomware attack, a natural disaster or a sudden geopolitical breakdown. The Fog combines the need to learn with the pressure to act.

The first job is to stabilize the system enough that people can think, and that starts with your own stress response. In high-stakes situations, people borrow from your nervous system. Then, you communicate what is known and what is still uncertain, triage what is deteriorating fastest, and choose moves that are as reversible as possible while still affecting the outcome. Each move should teach you something. The FOG FILTER was built for exactly this moment.

The two misdiagnoses that do the most damage

The framework earns its keep when it stops you from leading one kind of challenge as if it were another. Two mistakes come up often.

The first is treating Adaptive work as Expert Delivery.

I worked with a professional services firm that raised pay and kept getting negative reviews from its staff. The complaints stayed the same: people said they were underpaid and overworked. Underneath that was a feeling that people were not seen or valued, and that the culture was very transactional. A pay rise is an Expert Delivery answer, and it could not reach the root problem.

The second is treating Fog as an Emergency Response.

Under pressure, leaders reach for command, because command is what emergencies reward. However, in the Fog nobody knows the right answer yet. The leader's work is to define the process and guide the team to find the right answer. The key is to keep the process structured, while remaining flexible to revisit and refine your answers as the picture clears.

Most leaders are in more than one zone at once

Organizations rarely sit in a single zone. One part of the business may be in Expert Delivery while another is in the middle of an adaptive change and a third is in the Fog. The skill is to hold all of that at once and to match your pace, posture and communication to each piece of work.

The mix also shifts as you move up. Senior leaders spend far more of their time in Adaptive work and in the Fog, because the work that reaches the top is the work that could not be resolved further down.

Why this matters for women leaders

Women are more likely to be appointed to some leadership roles during periods of organizational difficulty, a pattern researchers call the glass cliff. That makes it more likely that the mandate will contain Adaptive or Fog work, often without the authority or resources the situation requires. When you can name which kind of challenge you are facing, ask for the time, support, and ways of working needed to get the job done.

Questions to ask before you act

• What do we actually know about the problem, and what do we know about the solution?
• How fast will the consequences unfold if we wait?
• Where does the problem actually live, and who has the knowledge to address it?
• What will people have to lose for this to change?
• Are we treating something urgent as if it were clear?

Common questions

What is the difference between an Emergency Response and the Fog?

Both are urgent. In an Emergency Response the answer is known, so trained experts act fast and the leader clears their path. In the Fog the answer is unknown, so the leader stabilizes first and uses small, reversible moves to learn what is going on.

Where does the framework come from?

It builds on Ronald Heifetz's distinction between technical and adaptive challenges at Harvard. The Leadership Challenge Framework adds urgency as a second dimension, which separates Expert Delivery from Emergency Response and Adaptive work from the Fog.

The bottom line

Diagnosis takes a few minutes, and it shapes everything that follows: how fast you move, how much you consult, who decides and what you tell people.

Kirsti Samuels is CEO of KS Insight and Adjunct Professor at Columbia University's School of International and Public Affairs, where she teaches leadership in high-stakes environments.