The word context showed up on both the KM list of “C” words and the Complexity list. It is a word that we throw around a lot, and one whose meaning we seem to agree on, but maybe don’t think about as much as we could. That’s why I was happy to see Art Hutchinson’s recent post Context Check: Rapid Shifts and Bunny Trails (which was in response to  a WSJ article,  How Not to Run Meetings that I am not currently privileged to access).

Art looks at context in the, uh, context of business meetings and the habit that such meetings have of drifting among tactical, strategic, and intermediate topics in a way that not everyone in the meeting can keep up with the shifts.  He points out that we come into meetings with two contexts:

• Our individual context, the sum of what I’ve heard, read, or surmised about what’s going on
• The group context, the sum of the experiences, assumptions, and knowledge which group or meeting participants hold in common and which they are “aware of what they hold in common and agree that they hold in common. ” (Art’s emphasis.)

One of Art’s specialties is a scenario-based strategy method that begins with an exercise that helps all attendees surface their assumptions so that the group context becomes explicit. They do this in conversations in which they respond to the likelihood that future events will happen or not.  Similarly, Cognitive Edge methods for sensemaking in complexity  (include one called “Future Backward”)  provide an environment in which groups can both create and find patterns in a collection of anecdotes or events in a way that leads the group to share context.

I wonder and ponder about the context-making of our new tool kits for awareness in the social age: Twitter, Brightkite, Friendfeed, Dopplr, Digg, etc all provide a way for me to share some elements of my context with others. And certainly the use of Twitter and Wikis during natural emergencies  (as at HurricaneWiki.org); for corporate context (as the CEO and others at Zappos use twitter for collective awareness); or for national movements and events (as our current political campaign in the U.S.

Will  the accumulation of small bits of information and knowledge build up a shared context when we are all tweeting in the flow?