Context is not everything
John Morley
Freelance Innovation Consultant helping Teams solve hard problems and generate brand new value | Where people thrive, organizations prosper
“What’s your story?”
It’s a difficult question because there are any number of stories we can all tell. But the world and all its algorithms desperately want us to pick one.
Stories capture our attention and appeal to us because they are relatable. But the resolution in a story is not dependent on the context. The mechanics of a resolution in any context involve the human conditions and circumstances that underpin those stories. The resolution is not dependent on the situation present in one story or another. The story is simply the relatable, consumable layer.
The resolution in a story is not dependent on the context.
A story is a medium for conveying a truth. It is not in itself the truth.
A story is a medium for exposing how a challenge is presented, explored, and ultimately resolved. The context of the story is what we recognize or relate to; the issue to be resolved is an underlying one that could underpin any number of different stories.
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A story is a medium for conveying a truth. It is not in itself the truth.
The context is what we relate to, and it’s specific. The mechanics are what we explore when resolving underlying challenges, and these are universal. The story is the resolution of a ‘presenting’ problem. The resolution itself is the matching of available assets with dynamic real-time needs. That’s unconditional and applicable in any number of stories.
Our human ability to change jobs, move and thrive in different places and cultures, innovate, love different people at different stages of our lives, and so on - these are all examples of our innate ability to context-shift comfortably and resolve any number and variation of challenges. We throttle our capacity needlessly when we deny it.
#story #context #choice #futureofwork
Explores adapted organizational capability with higher impact
9 个月So there are a lot of contexts out their looking for content / stories? A lot of solutions looking for problems. It aligns with 2nd law of thermodynamics, the increasing entropi eventually leading to cosmic death. The meaning of life is to battle entropi by creating (temporary) order out of chaos. I like that. In the end the context is known, the last dishes wiln never be made. Doing dishes is living. Planting a tree is living. Sorting socks is living. Procresting is living. Telling stories is living. The desitination / SMART goal is the context. Getting there, and to the next, is living. Said that, as a pun: ”it’s not the context, stupid”. Beautiful and inspiring, again John Morley . Thank you !
Wild hope and a few good words...
9 个月... I wonder what happens when you add time? ??
Director I Global Health and Safety Leader
9 个月Thank you John for sharing your thoughts. Context is certainly not everything. The focus on context can overlook conditioning - our unique upbringing, social values, norms and beliefs. ? I try to avoid associating storytelling with the word truth. To me, stories are mediums for conveying a perspective, for which there may be many. The word truth suggest singular and supreme, where my truth reigns above yours. I find Foucault’s concept of veridictions useful is considering the what type of truth stories provide us. If the story is shared, the story can become veridiction, a truth according to a particular authority or worldview, rather than being independently or objectively. I attempted to explore Foucalt's veridiction last year: https://www.dhirubhai.net/pulse/who-decides-what-counts-gets-counted-james-pomeroy/ ?
?? Senior Technical Program Manager | Cybersecurity Compliance, MSc, PMP, Agile, CSM, CSPO
9 个月John Morley can you please give an example distinguishing story from context as you’re defining it? Would you say story and narrative are the same thing? Would context be the framing and the story is what is woven within it? So within a certain context any number of stories can be written?
Principal Scientist at Perspicacity; Emeritus Professor of Psychology at Wright State University
9 个月John Morley I think I agree - context is not everything! But it may be essential for bridging from the meaning of one person's experience to another's. I would say that meaning is everything! AND that context enhances our ability to get past words to grasp the deeper meaning of experience.