Context is everything, and it’s what I built my company on

Imagine a vice-president of engineering waking up to a message.
It says everything’s okay.
On some mornings, that line means relief. On others, indifference.
After a big release, it’s a sigh of survival.
After a quiet night, it’s almost nothing.

Same words, different meaning.
That’s context.

Context is the framework around every question, decision, or message.
It’s what turns data into meaning, and meaning into relevance.
It’s the difference between an answer and the right answer for you, right now.

What context really is

Context is everything unsaid that changes everything else.
It’s the background of assumptions, limits, and expectations that give shape to communication, design, and decision-making.
It’s what makes information useful—or useless.

When someone asks, is the report ready?, the question only makes sense if you know the situation.
Are they heading into a board meeting?
Working late for the fifth night in a row?
Is this a weekly check-in or a fire drill?
Without that, you’re guessing which version of ‘ready’ they mean.

We strip that background away because it’s messy, personal, and hard to measure.
So we build dashboards, workflows, APIs, and metrics.
And in the process, we remove the very thing that gives the data life.

The four dimensions of context

Context shows up in four ways.

1. Human – language, culture, timing, emotion, relationships.
2. Organisational – power, money, compliance, purpose.
3. Technical – systems, interfaces, latency, libraries, compatibility.
4. Physical – geography, time zone, environment, resources.

Each shapes how we ask questions, interpret answers, and act on them.
Good work starts by deciding which of these matter most.
Is it language? Politics? Latency? Regulation?
You can’t fix everything, but you can pick what matters and design for it.

Without that act of prioritising, you’re doing the minimum—answering generically and leaving others to adapt.
With it, you’re shaping the response so it fits their world, not yours.

Why context is everything

Most tools and conversations fail because they assume one-size-fits-all clarity.
They give answers without checking whether those answers make sense in the recipient’s world.
That’s how correct becomes irrelevant.

In practice, context is empathy, encoded.
It’s what turns operational excellence—dashboards, metrics, automation—into customer intimacy.
It’s what separates the data’s there if you look for it from here’s what matters, and why.

Without context, we produce output.
With it, we create understanding.

That’s why I built everything—my writing, my work, my company—around it.
Because once you start paying attention to context, you see that it isn’t an accessory to insight.
It is the insight.