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3. Context – how do you make sense of it all?

“Without context, words and actions have no meaning at all. This is true not only of human communication in words but also of all communication whatsoever, of all mental process, of all mind, including that which tells the sea anemone how to grow and the amoeba what he should do next.” -Gregory Bateson

We can add to the stimulus-response model to consider how the context or situation that we are in affects our conversations.

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But what do we mean by context? The Cambridge Dictionary defines it as follows:

    context (noun): the situation within which something exists or happens, and that can help explain it.

Context determines what we pay attention to including what we “see” and “hear”, and what signals we attend to from our body. It defines what assumptions we make.

Context tells us what is true for us, based on our experiences. This explains why people can interpret things differently, have their own version of events and experience different feelings when they are in the same situation. Our experiences are unique to us. Context is our story.

We carry our context, our story, with us into a conversation, as does the person we are talking to. We can co-create context and improve future conversations with that person. We can do this by developing a shared purpose, shared language and shared experiences.

Context is complex. To better understand what context is, and how it might affect our conversations, we can chunk it down into six different areas:

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Area Description
Psychobiological Factors Psychobiological Our emotions, physiological state, intentions, motivations, personal values, beliefs, personality, identity etc.
Sociocultural Factors Sociocultural Our relationships, the roles we adopt, group rules, status, cultural values, customs, beliefs, language and communication patterns.
Historical FactorsHistorical What has happened in the past, and what has been documented or recorded.
Temporal Factors Temporal Time-related aspects, including what time of day, the schedule, the sequence of conversations.
Environmental Factors Environmental Location and surroundings (including virtual environments), temperature, weather etc.
Method Factors Method What medium you use to communicate e.g., letter, email, in-person, sign language, chat, text message, video call and the process you use e.g., a series of communications of different types.

These areas overlap and aren’t mutually exclusive categories. They are intended to help you think through the different aspects of context, to make choices about communicating with others. The content of our communication is influenced by intentions, our state, and the information we receive from others. This will be covered later in this document.

Examples of questions to ask about context to open a conversation are:

  • What brings you here?

  • What were you doing just before this? What else do you have on today?

A useful one for online meetings with global participation is:

  • Where are you in the world?

It is impossible to know all the context that we or the other person brings to the conversation. That’s because some of it is not observable to us, and we may not be fully aware of some of our own context. This means, not only do we need to be aware of our own thoughts and feelings, values, beliefs etc., we also need to have some awareness of what’s going on for the other person. Listening and asking questions helps us do this.

You can check the different aspects of context by using these question stems:

  • Who? Why? Whether? These map to the psychobiological and sociocultural areas. The decision of whether you should be communicating is linked to intentions and motivations (covered later).
  • When? What happened? What is evidenced? These can help you think of the historical and temporal aspects of context, what happened before and what might happen next. The third question stem helps you prepare for situations where data and observations are important.
  • Where? Whereabouts? This helps you consider the environmental, locational elements of context, including the time zone you want to communicate in.
  • How? What form? This focuses on the type of communication media or channel you might use and helps you consider the process you might use (such as a series of conversations).

Please note that all these questions, especially why questions can create defensive responses in others if they imply the other person is wrong or to blame e.g. “Why are you late?”. We will cover intention and impact in Section 5.

We also need to be aware that we can make inaccurate assumptions both when we don’t have enough information and when we have a lot of information about the person and their context. It helps to check what you know (or think you know) to understand whether your assumptions are helpful and how accurate they are.

We will cover some powerful questions in the next section that will help manage assumptions about the other person and their context.