Context over control: the future of remote work

Context is the surrounding knowledge that drives behaviors, plans, and decisions of an organization. The key idea is that context it’s not based on individuals, it’s based on responsibilities. In other words, people who share the same responsibilities should share the same context.

a team with autonomy and context will operate in a more self-directed manner than one that lacks one of those two things.

context building will play a critical role in the foreseeable future for any organization but it’ll be absolutely paramount to those organizations who aren’t physically co-located.

The absence of a surrounding context incentives control. Context incentivizes individual autonomy and independent decision making Control, on the other side, incentivizes centralized decision-making and high individuals inter-dependency

The more context is available, the less control is needed and vice-versa.

Most people think conflict arises when A thinks X and B thinks Y. In reality, conflicts have higher chances to arise not when people don’t share the same ideas, but when don’t share the same context and don’t make judgments using the same lenses.