Contextual awarene$$

Many of the things I have been developing lately, with the Heart, Body & Aura model and strategic meaningful Constellations as main pillars, have a lot in common. They are based on an insight about the value of an awareness of the context. This is not new in a way. We have micro and macro in economics, company versus industry analysis in business, individual behaviour in relation to value frameworks in culture theory and so forth. Even from a personal point of view, not least through social media, we are struggling to find a balance between the private sphere and the public.

But for many of us and for many entities and companies the context itself is more fluid than it once felt to be. (With the recent political earthquakes in the world I am even more convinced that an awareness of the context is both urgent, important and necessary, not least for strategic thinking.) Globalisation, interdependencies, weaker nation states and transparent borders have been a matter of fact for quite a while now. Yet much strategic thinking still depart from the idea of an entity or corporation as being an island or a fortress. Or an even more to the point metaphor — a boat. The CEO as the captain of a ship which sets off on journeys on a fluid vast ocean.

(Did you know that the Swedish word for wishy washy (flummig) stems from the latin word fluid?)

The linear aspect of contexts is indeed being used, such as defining value chains or channel analysis, but these still derives from the same idea of being autonomous. Like a Nation State. In many ways the Corporation is more like a Nation State than nation states themselves.

To my experience most companies are much much more entangled than they would like to think they are. Simply because the people guiding and working for the company are entangled in ideas about who they are and need to be like when they are working for a certain company, at a certain position in a particular industry, producing certain values for pretty standardised reasons. Industry conventions as it where. The somewhat funny thing is that these are usually rather obvious to outsiders, while inside the context this certain reality has become the normal and ”common sense”.

Until a disruptor comes along.

So an antidote to home blindness and actually a largely untapped source for innovation is to map out, understand, acknowledge and clarify your context. Try to avoid using the analogy of a chain, a tree or boxes connected by lines. Or if you have to just remember that the lines are just as important as the boxes. Clouds is a cool metaphor, undefined and constantly changing shape. An other analogy I personally really like is a kite. Flying a kite entangles at least four agents — the kite itself, the wind, the string that keeps it from simply blowing away and an anchor such as a person holding the string and finding pleasure in holding it. The whole is greater than its’ parts.

Please do contact me if you find these matters important as well.

Thanks for reading.

Jonas Bergvall 2016 / jonas@bergvalls.com