Context stewardship

When discussing what makes organizations work, we often focus on the visible things: decisions, roles, strategy, tools. But beneath all that is something quieter – something we rarely name, even though it shapes everything: context.

The context is made up of a lot of different parts – our relationship bonds, our trust, the shared rhythms, the rhythms of our bodies, the way our voice sounds, the shared memories, even our laptops, our furniture, the books we’ve read, the muscle memory of the things we do in our organizations, and even what we learned in grade school. Everything. 

You can call it “culture” too, but I find that people think about head-y things when they think about culture, like mindsets and “values“, and don’t find those concepts too useful. The context is not conceptual. It’s lived, embodied, and very present.

In fact, I think being in touch with the context is pure presence to what is. 

If you tune into everything that is present in the moment, you tune into context. 

In organizational life, context is the invisible layer that surrounds and shapes how we act. It’s not the action – it’s what allows and shapes it. I think we underestimate the influence of the context; we’re too busy telling ourselves that we are autonomous, clever beings with agency. And yes, we are. But we can’t magically be somewhere else than we are. 

In a river, a lot of flowing happens, sometimes beyond its river bed. But it can only flow from where it is. In the same way, we may have agency over the decision of pay rates for our new hire – but that pay rate lives with a context of the economy, our budget, and the pay for others in the company. 

We’re free, and we’re not. That’s how responsible participation works: you get to choose, but you have to acknowledge and live with the consequences. Ignoring context is a mistake – that’s only looking at the autonomy side, but ignoring the responsibility side. 

In addition, if we don’t see what holds everything together, then we also can’t improve the tapestry between us. And then all the decisions feel like hard work, because we didn’t build the stepping stones to get us there. We make white-knuckle decisions in heroic acts instead of doing the groundwork so the next step can be obvious and easy. We fight windmills instead of going with what flows. 

And we do that a lot. Our culture goes for the shiny, noisy, simple, discrete. It’s not so keen on care, maintenance, gentle, or the slow build. (That’s also why it took us so long to “see” the interstitium.)

Context stewardship

Since it’s easier to talk about the part we’re missing when we have a name, I want to call it context stewardship. 

Context stewardship is when we make sure that things between us are tended to, connected, flow-y, and aligned. When the gaps between things are filled in a meaningful way. When the connective tissue between things is healthy.

And that’s not in big action, it’s in many small actions. Checking in with a colleague who looked a little sad last week. Asking for clarification when we’re not sure how a word was meant. Using language that can easily be understood. Reading body language while we speak. Leaving time. Reminding ourselves of why we’re talking about an agenda item. Fixing or restocking something. Re-reading notes in preparation. Seeking perspectives. Speaking with consideration for the fuller truth of an issue. 

Without enough context stewardship, what is left is noise. We go through the motions, we make decisions, spend money and give reports. We seem to be running an organization but there’s no life in it, and nothing comes of it. We get caught in busywork. We make decisions that no one remembers, define guidelines that no one sticks to, and throw money around incoherently. Our new strategy is just a few more kilobytes in the cloud that we declare a “living document,” when in reality, it never started breathing. 

It’s hot air. Meaningless chatter governance. 

The context guides what we pay attention to. If the context is weak, we’re all over the place. If the context is rich like dark soil full of life, then our presence with what is aligns us. 

How to tend to the context

How do we become better context stewards? That’s what I’m interested in!

I think context stewardship is the practice of tending the conditions that shape our shared spaces. It’s a quiet kind of leadership – less about directing, more about noticing and nudging.

My hunch is that we have to meet the context with context – it doesn’t respond to declarations or diagrams, just like you can’t talk a river into changing its course or a flower into growing. To tend to a plant, someone will have dirt on their skin. Dirt speaks dirt, and water speaks water. 

Our organizations aren’t cerebral beings, they live in the world. It’s about going deeper into the context and participating in it, not distancing, abstracting, or “designing” it. That’s why context responds to presence and action, not declarations. 

Context stewardship, then, is a daily practice made up of a million things. It’s a change of perspective and a change of behavior. It’s choosing to tend the soil instead of shouting at the plants. It’s how we make space for the right things to emerge: not through force, but through attention and stewardship.