About In-Context-able
I started this site to document a specific kind of frustration: when the information we have doesn’t actually help us understand what is happening.
We have plenty of tools for moving data, but that doesn’t always lead to a shared understanding of the work. I’m interested in the gap between the “official” version of a project—the spreadsheets, the Jira tickets, the dashboards—and the actual experience of getting things done.
The things I notice:
The Map and the Territory: There is often a tension between the model we use to track work and the work itself. I’m interested in why we sometimes prioritize the “Map” even when it feels disconnected from what we’re seeing on the ground.
The “Nth Power” Problem: I’m curious about what happens when we add AI to an organization that is already struggling with context. My suspicion is that it might just scale the existing confusion.
Context Prioritization: In complex environments, multiple things can be true at once. A project can be “on track” according to one metric and “in trouble” according to another. The difficulty isn’t finding the data; it’s deciding which truth matters most right now.
I’m here to notice the glitches, not to sell a fix. My interest is in documenting the specific ways our systems stop adding up, and identifying the moments where a bit of human context makes the work feel coherent again. My hope is that by noticing these issues together, we can collectively come up with ways to address these challenges.
If you’ve ever felt like “Human Middleware”—the person manually bridging the gap between tools that don’t talk to each other—these observations will likely feel familiar.
