Why Context is King
I'm volunteering for a non-profit. I'm the roll-up-her-sleeves gal working on a project. As I go along, I have found the process rather opaque at times as to at which steps the board needs to review and approve, when those meetings are, how long that process will take, and when I will be thrown the ball again, et cetera.
One day I got frustrated and angry. I was feeling blind, following an opaque process and having to step in to work at times when the ball got passed to me without a heads up on timing. Worse, I was doing visual line-by-line comparisons of upgraded documents so I could understand what changed when the document was in others' hands. Does this sound familiar?
I know the theory behind how to not have this happen, but I am not immune to the emotional response when it does happen! And that was a refreshing reminder of how important it is to share context when you're passing work along or when you're leading a group to produce a shared work product.
When I find I've been left out of a process that I'm supposed to then pick up and run with, and extra work has been made for me that could have been avoided, I feel frustrated and angry. This slows my progress and clouds my thinking. I am pretty sure I am not the only one!
How could this process have been better designed to avoid the emotional clog?
I could have been invited to the meeting where changes were made.
Tracked changes could have been employed to assist me in quickly understanding what evolved in the document during that meeting.
The story of what had happened since I was last involved could have been shared.
That last point is what I want to focus on today. It's probably the easiest piece for leaders to change. Share the story of how we got here - otherwise known as context.
Context is king! I find knowing context helpful for so many reasons. Here are a few ways that knowing the context helps me:
I understand where my role fits into the bigger picture, so I can creatively engage in my role.
I more clearly understand motivations, the "why" behind what happened before I got involved.
It alleviates my feeling of blindness, like I'm working in a solo vortex.
I can assess if my understanding is in alignment with what I’m hearing.
I am able to prevent missteps and misunderstandings down the road by having more information.
I feel like a human and a partner and not a robot.
So what to do as the leader? You may not think to share context, because often it's implicit to you — just part of the background of your thinking. It's not 'what's up.' But it's so important.
Before you hit send on an email, go back to the beginning and add a sentence that links that email to the piece that came before and the bigger picture.
Plan on time to share context in meetings before “diving in.”
See yourself as a teacher. (If you're saying things you want to stick, then the people listening are learners. That makes you a teacher. What gets delivered needs to be bucketed into a bigger picture that is already understood.)
Do these things even if you think the person with whom you're talking already understands the context. First, you'll confirm that that is actually true. Second, it will orient your brains and build a platform upon which you can discuss and create something great together.
