To understand the place of context in our lives, we must be physically immersed in it, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually engaged with it, and finally, capable of responding in a manner where we can see ourselves making a difference that matters.
Understanding Context
Context is more than an idea. It is the environment that exists wherever we are. It is not simply the description of a place.
Take the picture above. The range of mountains on the horizon is the Grand Tetons of Jackson Hole, Wyoming. However, the picture is taken near Sylvan Pass, one hundred miles away in Yellowstone National Park. Directly behind where I stand is a road and the embankment of a road cut. What, then, is my context? Is it the physical location of Sylvan Pass? Is it the fascinating visual interplay of two. national parks in America? Is it the meaning that I derive from these two places because of the people I know, the time I have spent in both places and the fantastic geological record of the Yellowstone region?
We access context through physical encounters, abstract analysis, and engagement through our senses. This creates an embodied knowledge of context. It matters because knowing where we are and why it is meaningful helps us discern what we are to do.
Over my lifetime, I have participated in many memorial services of people who have died. One of the common things I’ve heard is of the loss of perspective that comes without the loved one being present. The deceased person provided an orienting context for their lives.
Now, what is it they are precisely saying?
They mean that the person’s relationship to them grounded them in a specific moral space, like a road sign or landmark along a highway, as a reference point for how to know who they are and why their life has meaning.
While I appreciate the love that this thought describes, it also points to a lack of capacity to know how to orient oneself to the context we are in.
Another example of this failure to orient to context is the response by people to the messaging of the COVID global pandemic. Did logic guide people’s decisions? Or did an inadequate understanding of physical health and science make one susceptible to fear?
For a very long time, I have observed and addressed the issue of people not being able to think for themselves. By this, they let others make their decisions for them. In many situations, this “blind trust” has caused harm to their bodies, their bank accounts, and their relationships as socio-political conflicts come to dominate our interactions.
It is important to understand the context we are in. It follows from not only rationally understanding the situations that we are in, but also engaging with the people and the physical space that we are in.
An Embodied Context
It was Michael Polany, many decades ago, that pointed me toward seeing the world as something more than a rational perception of my mind. Instead, our whole bodies are like a grand information-receiving station. He spoke of this tacit knowledge as something we know but do not know how we know.
We walk into a room and we sense something. That sensing is how we orient to context. Iain McGilchrist speaks of this in his description of the asymmetrical human brain.
“… two contradictory definitions of reason, … the product of the left hemisphere’s take on the world; the other, of the right’s. … we use both; that the right hemisphere’s broader view of the world can accommodate both but that the left hemisphere is prone to regard its version of reason, rationality, as sufficient and, as a result, produces a narrow, ratiocentric account of the world that is deeply misleading.”
When I read this, I think of a perspective that means everything we can know is somehow fixed in place. In other words, what we can know, we can know absolutely and with certainty from now through eternity. I don’t believe this to be true because a version of Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle applies to how we understand the world.
“Formulated by the German physicist and Nobel laureate Werner Heisenberg in 1927, the uncertainty principle states that we cannot know both the position and speed of a particle, such as a photon or electron, with perfect accuracy; the more we nail down the particle's position, the less we know about its speed and vice versa.
In other words, if we could shrink a tortoise down to the size of an electron, we would only be able to precisely calculate its speed or its location, not both at the same time.”
The same holds true for understanding context. It is a constantly shifting environment. Impossible to ever fully understand, we need to learn to constantly adapt to our circumstances.
Orienting Context
John Boyd’s OODA Loop is a way to access context.
The focal point of our engagement with Context is not Observation, Decision-making, or Action. Instead, we are constantly Orienting ourselves to Context.
When I, along with my two sons, were involved in the Scouting movement, we would annually introduce the new scouts to our troop through an orienteering experience. The troop would hike up to a large mountain pasture with a stream running through it. We set up a course where each boy would be given coordinates to locate specific places within the physical territory of the woods, pasture, mountainside, and stream. Orienteering was both a physical challenge and a mental one.
The most important was being able to see what is before you. Each coordinate represents an object of orientation. Not just within the boundaries of the area we are working in, but also in the larger context of global orientation. Knowing north from south and east from west is like knowing the moral or values orientation of your team. Being able to identify True North enables every other measured coordinate to make sense.
Over the years of working with the scouts, I realized that children are not taught to observe. They are taught to follow. As a result, one of the lessons of leadership that we had to teach the boys was identifying the changes in the context of the landscape during hikes and what is happening within the social structure of the scouts. When the older boys take off at a fast pace, leading the way on a hike, they. would often forget the younger and less fit boys at the back. The teachable moment would come as the troop spread out so that some boys were separate and out of sight of their leaders. As a result, we began to reorient the troop from individual advancement to maintain unity and cohesion as we hike. We put the slower boys at the front. It reminds me of a verse by St. Paul as he writes in 1 Corinthians 12 about the body of the church,
“On the contrary, the members of the body that seem to be weaker are indispensable, and those members of the body that we think less honorable we clothe with greater honor, and our less respectable members are treated with greater respect; whereas our more respectable members do not need this.”
The skills of orienteering through our camping program translated to the practice of troop and patrol leadership. These five principles oriented our troop toward how we would function as an organization of young people and adults
Every scout will learn leadership.
Every scout will advance through training and skills achievement.
Every scout will have fun.
We teach leadership through the camping program.
We were the uniform as a symbol unity and strength.
The principles applied to everyone so that everyone would know where they stood in relationship to their own advancement and enjoyment as a member of the troop. Those principles adopted twenty years ago and reinforced at every meeting since, still provide the foundation that orients each participant to know what their responsibility to the troop of scouts and scouters is.
John Boyd’s Perspective
When we address ourselves to the Context we are in, we look at the entirety of our living experience in the present moment. However, this is not simply a process of having some image that captures our Context. It is a whole-bodied perception of the Context that we are in.
John Boyd, in his briefing Conceptual Spiral, describes the interaction and development of what science, engineering, and technology provide us. He writes,
“If we examine the contributions from the practice of science and engineering and generalize from these individual contributions, what do we see? We see new ideas, new systems, new processes, new materials, new etc.
In other words,
Science, engineering, and technology produce change via novelty.
How is this Novelty Produced?
To examine novelty, we speak of it in terms of those features that seem to be part of that novelty. In other words, we reduce a novel pattern down to some features that make up that pattern. Different people in examining such a pattern may see differing features that make it up. In other words, there are different ways by which a pattern can be reduced, hence the possibility for differing features or parts, Regardless of how it comes out, we call this process of reduction, analysis.
Pushing this process even further, we can reduce many different patterns (analyses) to parts that make up each pattern and use these parts or variations thereof, to make a new pattern. This is done by finding some common features that interconnect some or many of these parts so that a new pattern - whether it be a new concept, new system, new process, new etc. - can be created we call this proccess of connection, synthesis.
Now if we test the results of this process with the world we’re dealing with, we have an analytical synthetic feedback loop for comprehending, shaping, and adapting to the world.
Pulling all this together, we can say that:
Novelty is produced by a mental/physical feedback process of analyses and synthesis that permits us to interact with the world so that we can comprehend, cope with, and shape that world as well as be shaped by it”
This is what I meant earlier this year in my series on Synthesis. I see the synthetic awareness of Context as synthesizing our direct experience of the world. We learn how to adapt to changing circumstances this way.
I like Boyd’s notion of novelty very much because it shows that we can always find a new orientation that is not a mirror image of the old one. What is required of us is to perceive the world in multiple ways at the same time. This is really what understanding Context demands of us.
It is very much like hiking through a landscape that is new to us. We need to a compass and a map to interpret what we see before us. Learn to orienteer through your life and even in the midst of change, you’ll always know where you are.
Iain McGilchrist adds to this aspect of our perception of context.
“One important element of perception is the ability to make sense of a stimulus using contextual information. This requires a swift capacity to synthesize bottom-up, local, information, with top-down, holistic, information, a process that depends principally on the right hemisphere.”
Context - The Direct Difference
Everything that we do and that happens to us occurs in a physical context. Even our experiences of simulation have a physical impact on us. The challenge that we face today is that so much of the context that we are in does not require our direct engagement. It is simulated, detached, and removed from our direct experience. And yet, it has a physical effect on us. I see this effect as feelings of alienation and detachment from reality.
I don’t believe we can escape the context of The Spectacle of the Real. It immerses us in its simulated experience that our certainty about what is taking place in our lives is always questionable. How do we reclaim a strong relationship to the context of our lives? I believe the Circle of Impact model provides the answer.
The inspiration for this model came from seeing three patterns of behavior that were consistent across a spectrum of organizations, from small and local to large and global. The patterns are identified by a lack of some quality and then characterized as one of three dimensions of leadership:
Lack of Clarity of Thought - the Ideas Dimension
Lack of Relationships of Respect, Trust, and Mutuality - the Relationships Dimension
Lack of an Understanding of How the Organization’s Structure Creates Impact - the Structure Dimension
As this perception of organizations became more apparent to me, I realized that many of the problems that people and organizations face are due to a lack of understanding of their context. They don’t know where they are because they don’t know where they fit and, therefore, can’t describe where they belong or what they should do.
As The Spectacle of the Real emerged, I realized that these three patterns of behavior were not just perceptions of context. They were the contexts of direct experience.
I am saying that we can distinguish reality from hyperreality, or direct experience from a simulated experience. Finnish architect Juhani Pallasmaa writes,
“The computer is usually seen as a solely beneficial invention, which liberates human fantasy and facilitates efficient design work. I wish to express my serious concern in this respect, at least considering the current role of the computer in education and the design process. Computer imaging tends to flatten out magnificent, multi-sensory, simultaneous and synchronic capacities of imagination, a retinal journey. The computer creates a distance between the maker and the object, whereas drawing by hand as well as working with models put the designer in haptic contact with the object, or space. In our imagination, the object is simultaneously held in the hand and inside the head, and the imagined and projected physical image is modeled by our embodied imagination. We are inside and outside of the conceived object at the same time. Creative work calls for a bodily and mental identification, empathy and compassion.”
In other words, without an embodied experience, it is difficult to orient ourselves to the context of our lives. We are like those scouts who, as they lose themselves in their personal enjoyment of the trail, fail to maintain a connection to the younger scouts who lack knowledge and experience.
In other words, orienting to context is not just personal but communal. It isn’t just a mental process but a direct engagement process with our surroundings in the social context of our relationships with other people. The truth of the orienting experience is that it is an experience of change and transition. Every change of perception, of attitude, of our relationships, and direction are ways that we live in transition. In this sense, finally, transition is life. We live this life orienting ourselves to the landscapes that confront us out our front door.