PMO COACHING
  • Home
  • Podcast
  • Work with Us
  • Productivity Journal
  • Curriculums
    • Book List
    • Change Management
    • Customer Experience
    • Financial Acumen
    • Career Growth
  • Be a Guest

080: The Importance of Context

5/10/2021

 
Everything we do, everything we hear, or see, or participate in has a context within which it happens.
Context is very often invisible.

Although it is there, it isn’t obvious or up-front so it sometimes gets lost. But, the thing is that a lot of times it makes all the difference to the situation. Learning to look for the context in the situation you are in will help you make better decisions, build better relationships, and come up with better solutions.

The definition of context is ‘the circumstances that form the setting for an event, statement, or idea and in terms of which it can be fully understood and addressed.

You can’t fully decide how you will react to an event until you have the context around the decision in order to be able to fully understand the situation.

Understand Your Process for Considering Context
Understanding how often you consider context when you make decisions is an important tool in building your emotional intelligence.

The more you understand about the context of the situation, the better able you will be to respond in a manner that aligns with your personal values.

And, I’ll take it a step further and say that when you become good at identifying context, you can help your colleagues as well. When you are in a meeting and an issue comes up, if you are able to ask questions that help uncover the context, everyone involved will have more information to fully understand and address the situation.

How To Uncover Context
There are some questions you can use to help uncover context:
  • Can you tell me more about that?
  • What led you to make this decision?
  • What was the situation that led to this problem?
  • Can you give me some more context about the situation?
I imagine there are a lot more examples, and of course the specific situation will somewhat dictate what makes sense to ask.

One of the important things to keep in mind when you are asking questions in order to draw out context is to make sure the questions are coming from a place of curiosity. You are asking the questions in order to have a more rounded understanding of the situation; to be able to give yourself a fuller picture that will allow you to draw from a wider selection of responses.

This is curiosity.

If you ask the questions in a manner that comes across as accusatory or judgmental, the person you are talking with is likely to shut down.

Don’t React – Take the Time You Need
If you are the type of person who reacts, this may feel a little foreign to you. It may seem like it takes longer. But, reacting without gathering information about context can have consequences. Your colleagues may feel that they can’t trust you because your reaction hasn’t taken their point of view into account.

Using Context to Design a Business Process
Or, on a less personal level, a reaction can result in a less efficient or less effective process. When designing business processes, understanding context is critical in ensuring efficiency, ease of use, and even adoption.

For example, I’ve been working on designing a new customer portal for our help desk. I’m not in a customer facing role, so I don’t have a lot of context about what kinds of things our customers come to the customer portal to get help with.
As we were defining the options they can select, I had to ask a lot of questions to be able to find a solution that would be effective for them.

I asked questions like: “Does the customer know which of our products they use, or do they just think of our product as ‘our company name’? Designing a process that assumes the customer knows or distinguishes between our different software products is not effective if the customer doesn’t have that context.
Another question I asked was “why would a customer come to the customer portal in the 1st place?” I needed the context of what the customer is thinking in order to be able to define a process that will be efficient for them.

Use Stakeholder Analysis
Another important way to gather context for business process solutions is to use stakeholder analysis. When you are faced with an issue or challenge, how often do you step back and assess the people who are impacted?

Who are the people – whether individuals, departments, or groups – that are impacted? Is your solution taking all of these stakeholders into account?
​
In the coming weeks, observe yourself as you are faced with  issues or situations. Is your natural tendency to think about the various stakeholders before you make a decision? Who are you considering when you come to a conclusion? Are you casting a wide enough net?
 
In this episode, you’ll learn:
  • Why context is important for your career
  • How context impacts your ability to make decisions
  • How to become skilled at identifying context
  • How to learn the context of problems you face
  • How to design efficient business processes by using context
  • How to use stakeholder analysis to better understand context
 
Help us spread the word:
  • Share this episode with your LinkedIn contacts. Go to our LinkedIn page, select a post, and hit share.
  • Subscribe to the podcast on Apple Podcasts
  • Add us to your playlist on Spotify
  • Subscribe to the podcast on Stitcher
  • Invite me to your next team meeting
  • Improve your productivity with my Productivity Journal


Comments are closed.

    PMO COach

    I teach people how to thrive at work. ​Let's connect on LinkedIn

    View my profile on LinkedIn

    Subscribe

    Listen and subscribe wherever you enjoy your podcasts, including:
    Apple Podcast
    Spotify
    Stitcher

    RSS Feed

    Book Links

    Please note: wherever I reference a book the link is an Amazon affiliate link. Your cost is the same, but a small portion of your purchase comes back to me to help offset the costs of the podcast. I've also got a list of all of the books I read that you can peruse.  

    Categories

    All
    Annual Review
    Career
    Career Day
    Change Management
    Communication
    Critical Thinking
    Customer Experience
    Efficiency
    Email Management
    Enneagram
    Financial Acumen
    Goals
    Influence
    Intuition
    Mindset
    Myers Briggs
    Networking
    North Star List
    Presentations
    Productivity
    Self Awareness
    Self Control
    Stress
    Teamwork
    Time Management

    Archives

    April 2022
    March 2022
    January 2022
    September 2021
    August 2021
    July 2021
    June 2021
    May 2021
    April 2021
    March 2021
    February 2021
    January 2021
    December 2020
    November 2020
    October 2020
    September 2020
    August 2020
    July 2020
    June 2020
    May 2020
    April 2020
    March 2020
    February 2020
    January 2020
    December 2019
    November 2019

Copyright 2021. All Rights Reserved. 
  • Home
  • Podcast
  • Work with Us
  • Productivity Journal
  • Curriculums
    • Book List
    • Change Management
    • Customer Experience
    • Financial Acumen
    • Career Growth
  • Be a Guest