First Principles Based Leadership – Improving our Contextual Awareness

Premise

In this series of posts about First Principles Based Leadership, we have already covered the importance of and how to improve our self awareness, social awareness and cultural awareness.

In this post, we will explore the importance of context and contextual awareness and how can we become more aware of the contexts that we operate in.

We live in a White Water World (as defined by John Seely Brown and Ann Pendleton-Jullian) where our environments tend to change pretty rapidly. Becoming aware of these changes in context is easy as they stare you in your face.

Sometimes, we see small shifts over a long period of time, which cause the context to change ever slowly and then suddenly. It is these changes in contexts that leaders and organisations typically miss and suffer big due to them.

Any and all deep dive into contextual awareness can only start by having worked on and improved our self, social and cultural awareness.

What is Contextual Awareness

The ability to notice shifts or changes in energy, interactions and the environment that we work in. This could be micro shifts or sometimes even macro shifts in the larger business environment. The higher up are we in the management hierarchy the more macro our awareness needs to be.

However, it starts with the ability to notice the shifts or changes in how people show up, their interactions with the larger ecosystem (other teams, customers, partners, vendors, etc).

Getting Better Contextual Awareness

There are many ways for us to improve our ability to sense these shifts. Here are a two ways that we can do this:

Micro Shifts in Contexts

Being intentional about looking for shifts in energy or interaction or environment is the first step in improving our contextual awareness.

We need to look for shifting energy on a regular basis, sometimes weekly, if we are looking at internal or micro shifts within the team; sometimes monthly or quarterly, if we are looking at external environments or macro shifts in the larger business environment.

It shows up as frustrations and anger among our team members or surprising feedback in surveys (qualitative or quantitative).

When something that always worked stops working, something that used to take a long time now takes very little or vice versa or someone that used to support the team stops supporting or vice versa, it is time to dig deeper and understand why that is happening.

When customers or vendors or partners complaining about new things or stopping to care about old things, it is time to stop and dive deeper.

It is not enough for us to look for it by ourselves. There is a good chance that we might miss important shifts. So, it is important to let our teams know about this and ask them to share any such shifts that they notice. Different perspectives help notice blind spots.

Macro shifts in Contexts

Looking at the trend reports by analysts gives us an indication if there is a shift in the context within which we are functioning. There are a lot of thought leaders and analysts whose job it is to notice these shifts and talk about it with their customers (current and potential).

So, it is important to attend industry or functional conferences to understand what these experts are noticing and then go check it for ourselves if we notice these shifts within our organisation or teams.

It is also important to attend conferences that cover other similar industries or functions as well, just to see what’s happening there, in case there is a possibility to understand if there are any changes in these industries or functions that might permeate our own function or industry. They also give a different perspective for us to look at the situation from.

In Conclusion

In conclusion, all I can say is that we now live in a world that is already complex and at the same time is constantly evolving, shifting and changing.

The worst thing that can happen to us as a leader is to miss these shifts and be blindsided by them at a time when we can’t have any influence over how to respond to these changes.

By developing our awareness of these contextual shifts, we are better able to prepare our responses and sometimes even influence how these shifts shape up.