The Context Machine: The Essence Is Context | Bas de Baar – Project Shrink.

In a series called The Context Machine I will summarize three years of looking for answers to the following question:

“If you are a Project Manager that operates for a short period of time in a foreign organization, with a global team you don’t know, in a domain you would not know, using virtual communication, high uncertainty, limited authority and part of what you do out in the open on the Internet, how do you make it all work?”

I recommend to read thefirst post before proceeding with this one.

To a guy with a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

Or, perhaps more appropriate: to a shrink every problem is psychological.

I view projects as a set of social interactions. And because we all define problems, solutions and things in general from our belief system, I see most project events in terms of communication, culture and behavior.

In this post I will introduce the notion of “context” as essential element in communication and as attractor for social clustering. This post is very theoretical, but needed to understand the framework in the next post. I’ll promise to keep the other posts less abstract

Communication is the single most important element in people working together. We’ll need some concepts to discuss this topic in a virtual and global environment.

People cluster together. We form groups for economic and social reasons. What if we could use our natural tendency forsocial clustering as a way to drive teams? We would have a very powerful mechanism on our hands.

Continues @http://www.basdebaar.com/the-context-machine-the-essence-is-context-3038.html

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