Excerpt from the book “Le Contexte”

This article is an excerpt from my book Le Contexte. To read it in full, download it or buy it on Amazon. The Amazon edition is available in French only; if you would like a version in another language, contact me.

Tuesday evening, 8:30 pm. Condo board meeting.

The building has a little over three hundred apartments. A facade renovation has been under way since spring. Three of us are overseeing the work, as volunteers, alongside our day jobs.

Marc goes first.

He ran into the site foreman in the courtyard last week. The aerial lift for building C has been pushed back. Maybe by two weeks. Maybe more.

Sophie follows.

She had the property manager on the phone. A leak has been reported on the fifth floor of building A. The property manager thinks it's caused by the work. The contractor thinks not.

As for me, I only have the emails.

And I'm three weeks behind, because my job took up all my time.

It takes us twenty minutes to get back on the same page. Twenty minutes telling each other what we each know, digging up what was said last time, wondering whether a decision was actually made or only floated.

Nobody did a bad job.

And yet nobody really knows how to pick the case back up.

Everything is kept, nothing is situated

The most frustrating part is that nothing is missing.

The emails are there. Hundreds of them. The meeting minutes too. The quotes, the photos, the contractor's successive schedules, the exchanges with the property manager, the owners' complaints.

If we wanted to reread everything, we could.

But that isn't what we need.

What we need to know is:

• where the work actually stands;
• what was decided, and what was only discussed;
• what is still fragile;
• what needs doing now.

None of this is written down anywhere.

The documents are filed in the order they were produced. The inbox sorts by date. The shared folder sorts by file name. The minutes tell the story of the meeting.

Everything is kept.

Nothing is situated.

The situation of the case exists only in our heads. And each of our heads holds a different version of it.

Information travels through the hallways

What Marc learned in the courtyard exists nowhere but in his memory.

That's not a failing. It's actually how a large share of useful information travels. The site foreman says things in the courtyard he would never put in an email. The property manager says on the phone what he wouldn't put in the minutes.

But the result is always the same.

Each member holds a different piece of the case.

And nobody knows what the others don't know.

Marc thinks everyone understood the aerial lift had been pushed back. Sophie believes the leak was already mentioned by email. I assume my reading backlog hasn't made me miss anything important.

Three reasonable assumptions.

Three ways to make a bad decision at the next meeting.

The same sentences at every meeting

Listening back to how our meetings start, I came to recognize a kind of ritual.

Before we can move on, someone always repeats the same things:

We ruled out redoing all of building C, it was too expensive for this year. The end date the contractor gave was only stated verbally, it isn't confirmed. The owner in 3B is still waiting for an answer about his shutters. We were supposed to chase the property manager about the retention payment. We'd got as far as signing off building B.

Five sentences.

I already knew them.

They were exactly the ones I typed to an AI when I reopened a conversation that was several days old. Before writing a single useful line, I had to tell it again who the audience was, which option we had ruled out, which figure was fragile, and where we had got to.

In both cases, everything I was repeating already existed.

It was just filed in the order it had been said.

A conversation, an email thread or a meeting stores information chronologically. Work that lasts needs a different order:

• an old decision has to stop the same discussion from being reopened;
• a fragile piece of information has to stay flagged as fragile;
• a pending item has to resurface at the right moment;
• the next step has to be visible without rereading everything that came before.

As long as nobody maintains that order, a human rebuilds it, every time, from memory.

What goes in its place: a Context

For several months now, I've been working with what I call a Context.

It's a lasting workspace, distinct from the conversation, that holds what a piece of work needs to keep over time: its goal, its material, its decisions and its current state. It can fit in a few readable files that the AI rereads at the start of every session.

The conversation remains the place for exchange. That's where you question, explore, correct.

What needs to last goes into the Context.

Applied to our condo board, it changes one very simple thing first: what Marc heard in the courtyard finally has somewhere to go.

He dictates it in two sentences on his phone on the way back up to his apartment. The information goes in as it is, along with what you need to decide what to do with it:

• where it comes from: the site foreman, verbally;
• when: last Tuesday;
• its status: reported, to be confirmed in writing.

It isn't turned into a certainty.

It isn't lost either.

It is situated.

Carrying on is not picking back up

The first instinct, when you want to keep better track of a case, is to make a to-do list.

Chase the contractor. Answer 3B. Get a quote for the leak.

It's useful.

But it isn't enough.

Carrying on means knowing the next action.

Picking back up means recovering the meaning of the work before taking that action.

A to-do list tells me I need to chase the contractor. It doesn't tell me why it's urgent, about what exactly, or what I absolutely must not agree to over the phone.

To pick the work back up, I need something richer:

• the goal the work is pursuing;
• where it has actually got to;
• the decisions that still steer what comes next;
• the fragile points not to forget;
• a next action precise enough to get going again.

For this, the Context keeps apart three things that the usual tools mix together:

• the current state says where things stand;
• the history says what happened;
• the pickup says what to do next.

The meeting minutes only do the second. They tell the story. That's valuable, but to get back to the current state and the next step, you still have to reread everything and decide for yourself what matters today.

One page before every meeting

In practice, before the next meeting, each of us opens a single page.

That evening, it said roughly this:

# Pickup

## Where things stand
Building A finished, signed off with two snags.
Building B in progress, sign-off planned for the end of the month.
Building C not started: aerial lift pushed back at least two weeks
(verbal info from the site foreman, to be confirmed in writing).

## What to know before carrying on
Leak on the 5th floor of building A: the property manager blames the work,
the contractor disputes it. Nothing settled, agree to nothing verbally.
The end date of the work has never been confirmed in writing.

## The next action
Ask the contractor for written confirmation of the new schedule
for building C, before building B is signed off.

## Still open
Answer to the owner in 3B about his shutters.
Chase the property manager about the retention payment.

One page.

I come back after three weeks away, I read it in a minute, and I'm on the same page as Marc and Sophie.

I haven't reread a single email.

The format isn't an accident. It reads in the order you need it. First a reading: where the work stands. Then a direction: what's fragile, what not to do. Then the action, which follows from both.

It also has to stay short.

A summary that's too short erases the reason behind a choice. You know you need to chase the contractor, without knowing why now.

A report that's too long pushes back the moment work starts again. Nobody reads three pages before a volunteer meeting on a Tuesday evening.

A single next action

The pickup page offers only one next action.

It's a constraint I imposed on myself, and it may be the most useful one.

There are always ten possible things. Chase the contractor, answer 3B, call the insurer, prepare the general meeting, check the invoices.

If the page lists them all, the next meeting has to redo the work of deciding: which one matters most? Which one do the others depend on?

That work has already been done. It would be absurd to start it over.

So the page names a single action, the one that unblocks the rest. The others stay visible in what's still open, but they no longer compete for attention.

Of course, you can decide differently when you arrive. A new fact can change the priority. An old decision may deserve to be reopened.

The page doesn't freeze the course.

It shows the course you're departing from when you decide to change it.

An interruption doesn't give notice

At first, I imagined that picking the work back up would come from closing things down cleanly. You finish a session, summarize carefully, write down what comes next.

Reality rarely follows that script.

A work meeting runs over. A child gets sick. The site has an incident on a Friday evening. And, at the scale of a condo board, there's worse: Sophie announces she's moving. Or a member doesn't stand again at the general meeting.

In most organizations, that's where everything gets lost.

The handover happens at the last minute, from memory, in an hour of discussion. The person leaving recounts what they think matters. The person arriving retains what they understand. The rest disappears.

The Context comes at the problem from the other direction.

It doesn't wait for someone to leave to prepare the pickup. It keeps it up while the work happens. A decision finds its place the moment it's made. A piece of hallway information goes in the moment it's heard. A task is noted the moment it appears.

And when the current state of the case needs to be frozen, it takes a few seconds. If it took longer, nobody would do it at the moment it's most useful, which is to say when you're in a hurry.

The day Sophie leaves, there's no heroic handover to organize.

Whoever replaces her reads the same page we do.

Picking the work back up becomes a property of the case, rather than a discipline expected of people.

What the page doesn't replace

It would be wrong to say all of this does away with conversations.

Marc will keep running into the site foreman in the courtyard. Sophie will keep getting the property manager on the phone. And it's often these informal conversations that bring the most useful information.

The Context doesn't replace them.

It gives them somewhere to go.

Nor does it decide for us. It doesn't know whether the leak comes from the work. It doesn't know whether to accept the new schedule. Those decisions remain ours.

What it guarantees is that we make them starting from the same point.

What has changed

Our meetings still start at 8:30 pm, on a Tuesday evening, after a day's work.

But the first twenty minutes are no longer spent telling each other what we each know.

They're spent deciding.

The five sentences we used to repeat every time, we no longer repeat. They're written down somewhere, and the AI rereads them for us at the start of each session.

A note on the examples

The examples in this article draw on more than thirty years of practice in IT and team management, and on many conversations with peers. I have modified, generalized or recombined them: none describes a real client, product or organization, nor reflects my employer's data or positions. The opinions expressed are mine alone.