A leader's prime responsibility is to provide context
A good use of a leader's effort is to provide their team context. So what is context, and what context is most useful for software development teams?
As far as I am aware, context and its use within product development do not have a definition beyond its lay meaning. But it’s a word we use often. For example:
“What’s the context for this request?”
“Let me share with you some more context about this work.”
I don’t like starting any writing with a dictionary definition, as it reminds me of a student essay contest entry. In this case, it may be useful. I checked the definition on Google and thought the definition there was good. Then, I felt bad for using the laziest example, so I checked a bunch of other dictionaries, hated most of those definitions, and returned to the Google one. I can’t escape the student essay vibes today; sorry, it’s only up from here.
context
/ˈkɒntɛkst/
noun: context; plural: contexts; the circumstances that form the setting for an event, statement, or idea, and in terms of which it can be fully understood.
Of course, it wouldn’t be a student essay if I didn’t also quote Oxford:
the situation in which something happens and that helps you to understand it
Good old Oxford. That’s quite a tidy definition.
When thinking about ‘context’ and its use in software development, I tend to think from the perspective of what software development teams need to know to make decisions. I have touched on this topic before in:
In that post I shared three types of context which are important in software development which I called:
HOW CONTEXT: The tasks expected to be done and knowledge of HOW to do the task(s).
WHAT CONTEXT: Understand WHAT the work we are doing is trying to achieve - i.e. what are the desirable effects of the work having been completed?
WHY CONTEXT: Agreement on the theory for WHY our tasks will achieve what we want.
I can think of examples that may be outside these — for instance, when we share who to engage with, but most examples I can think of like this probably support HOW CONTEXT. There is some really important information for teams that support decisions about HOW they will develop their software, such as what other teams are doing to help with coordination. What standards are important to the organisation?
Similarly, for WHAT CONTEXT, there is a lot of variety of information that can be useful: What is happening in the market? What risks has the organisation identified? What compliance requirements must the organisation abide by?
The next thing that occurs to me is that when we talk about the context leaders provide software development teams, we often think about and use it in the future tense. This is because it’s often used with goals, work to be done, reasons work needs to be done, etc. This is interesting to me because it suggests that there should be a narrower definition of context for software product development or one specific to its use in goal-setting. Let’s put a pin in that for another day.
Context in software development is important because it can support better decisions being made when team members can apply their judgement using the context they have. Software development involves so many decisions to be made every day. By every team member regardless of role. Every decision affects the quality of what users will experience. We want every decision to be as good as it possibly can be.
In my experience, the effect of decisions without context compounds. The effect of decisions with context is also compound. We should limit the volume of decisions without the adequate context to make a good decision.
Let me take a moment to clarify; I am not talking about perfect context — there’s some diminishing return on the information needed to make a decision, an effort/reward trade-off, which I am sure others have covered, so I will spend no more time on it here beyond saying that for the leaders the pay-off is high. For instance, when sharing information that provides context that many could use for decision-making, the return on effort is high, so most of the time, such a trade-off for a leader is moot.
So why is providing context a very productive activity for leaders relative to other productive activities? First, only leaders are privy to a lot of context. For instance, a leader responsible for multiple teams may have more context on what each team is doing than people within each team. There’s a responsibility to bridge that gap.
There’s also information from the broader organisation that may reach a leader first that may be pertinent to decision-making by their teams. Now may be a good time to clarify that when I describe a leader sharing context, I don’t mean that’s a leader droning on for hours. It’s the responsibility to facilitate context sharing. To think about how information flows.
For instance, ceremonies such as showcases and town halls where various teams present are great ways to disseminate context for sharing with other teams. Information from the broader organisation may be proactively curated and shared via email or Slack. There’s no one way to do this. Get creative and test and learn what works for your teams.
For me, I tend to think of context sharing as part of a perpetual communication plan similar to the approach I shared in:
Here are a few thoughts before I finish. Leaders apply effort to things that would have been better spent providing context. In the most extreme examples, micro-managing leaders opt for the short-term solution to their team members being unable to make the decision they would, given the context they have. They opt not to share the context that may allow the team members to make the same quality of decision because “they are too busy” and are directive or, worse, do the task themselves.
Providing context is truly the enabler of empowerment. A good test as a leader before taking any action is to consider whether it may be better solved by sharing the appropriate context instead.
By the way, to keep the student essay feel, I will share the word origin, which I think complements how context can be used in software product development:
ORIGIN OF CONTEXT
1375–1425; late Middle English <Latin contextus a joining together, scheme, structure, equivalent to contex(ere) to join by weaving (con-con- + texere to plait, weave) + -tus suffix of v. action; cf. text
How do you approach sharing context for work with others? What responsibilities of a leader might be more important than sharing context? Is there anything I have shared you disagree with? Share your perspective in the comments.
