About
We have more technology than at any point in human history, more data, more information systems, better communication tools — and we seem just as uninformed as ever. In some ways the problem seems to be getting worse.
Why?
This site is an investigation into that question. The opening hypothesis — the one each essay tests from a different angle — is that organizations have spent decades building everything around information without paying attention to the substrate underneath.
The substrate is context: the shared understanding that lets information mean something inside an organization. Without it, accurate information produces wrong decisions. With it, incomplete information can still produce correct action.
The site is named for what it asks. Incontextable: capable when in context.
How it’s organized
Each essay approaches the substrate from a different angle. The four lenses on the Writing page — Knowledge Turns, Data Metabolism, Total Cognitive Load, Information Half-Life — are different ways of asking how context is doing. They are instruments for noticing what’s already happening, not a methodology to learn.
The publication makes no promise of quick fixes. What’s here is a way of seeing — and the test is whether the questions you ask in your next vendor meeting, your next reorganization, your next single source of truth conversation get sharper.
Where the thinking comes from
The synthesis draws from three traditions that don’t usually talk to each other.
Goldratt, Reinertsen, Strassmann, Christensen, Roger Martin
McGilchrist, Rory Sutherland, Dan Davies, James C. Scott
Deutsch, Taleb, Feynman
Harold Bloom — careful reading and careful thinking turn out to be the same skill
Who this is for
The reader I have in mind is a working manager who has noticed the gap between what their organization knows and what it does. Or anyone who has been quietly carrying the suspicion that the dominant playbook doesn’t quite work, without being able to articulate why.
This site is an attempt to articulate it.