Context Stewards: The Missing Layer of Management
The role every organization needs—but none have formally named
Every organization has information. Almost none have coherence.
Organizations love the idea of empowerment.
“Everyone can make decisions!”
“Own your outcomes!”
“Take initiative!”
And yet the very same organizations quietly produce the conditions under which nobody knows who can decide anything, what is negotiable, which constraints matter, or why the last decision was made in the first place.
Information everywhere.
Authority nowhere.
Accountability diluted.
Execution stuck.
This isn’t a leadership problem.
It isn’t a communication problem.
It isn’t a process problem.
It’s ID — Information Dysfunction — the disconnect between information, authority, and action.
And ID exists because modern organizations are missing an entire layer of management:
Context Stewards — people responsible for maintaining the coherence of shared reality.
This role doesn’t exist formally.
But it exists informally in every organization.
And the people doing it are exhausted.
Let’s fix that.
Why organizations need Context Stewards
Organizations used to work because context lived inside the work.
You learned how things fit together by being near the people who understood why decisions were made.
Meaning was ambient.
Assumptions were shared.
Reality was local.
But as work became distributed, specialized, asynchronous, tool-mediated, and cross-functional, something broke:
Meaning stopped traveling with information.
Leaders set priorities.
Managers set plans.
Teams execute tasks.
Tools store artifacts.
But nobody maintains the connective tissue between them.
And when context isn’t stewarded, five things happen:
The model drifts from reality
Meaning dilutes as it spreads
Interpretations diverge
Rationale evaporates
Everyone recreates their own version of the truth
You get Divergence, Dilution, Decoherence, Decay, Duplication — the Five D’s of ID.
And no amount of tooling or “alignment” meetings can fix it.
Because what’s missing isn’t information.
What’s missing is Context Stewardship.
What Context Stewards actually do
This is not a PM role.
Not a chief of staff.
Not a business analyst.
Not an “alignment facilitator” (God help us).
A Context Steward has one primary job:
Ensure the organization maintains a coherent shared reality.
That means they do five things exceptionally well:
1. Preserve the WHY behind the WHAT.
Decisions aren’t just outcomes.
They’re logic paths.
Stewards capture:
the rationale
the constraints
the tradeoffs
the assumptions
the decision rights
the implications
Because execution without rationale is blind, and blind execution is where drift begins.
2. Maintain decision lineage.
Anyone can say what was decided.
Very few can explain:
who decided
based on what
under which constraints
and what conditions would cause a change
This isn’t documentation.
It’s organizational memory.
The absence of lineage is the cause of 80% of rework.
3. Synchronize interpretations across teams.
Every team has its own vocabulary, incentives, and worldview.
A Context Steward ensures:
Team A’s “priority” = Team B’s “priority”
Leadership’s “direction” = execution’s “decision”
Strategy’s “intent” = engineering’s “implication”
Most “misalignment” is not disagreement.
It’s decoherence.
Stewards prevent that.
4. Identify where authority is ambiguous.
They don’t wait for work to stall.
They see the early signs:
multiple owners
unclear RACI
orphaned decisions
dependency standstills
cross-team hesitation
And they surface a simple, catalytic question:
“Who owns the next decision?”
That question alone resolves half of ID.
5. Reduce duplication by creating reusable meaning.
If five teams rebuild the same plan, something is wrong upstream.
Context Stewards:
keep the “truth” stable
reduce redundant artifacts
maintain coherence across versions
stop the reinvention treadmill
Duplication is a symptom.
Coherence is the cure.
Why this isn’t ‘more middle management’
This is where people misunderstand the idea.
Middle management increases execution bandwidth.
Context Stewards increase meaning bandwidth.
Middle managers coordinate tasks.
Context Stewards coordinate understanding.
Middle managers ensure work gets done.
Context Stewards ensure work makes sense.
Middle managers ask:
“What needs to happen?”
Context Stewards ask:
“What assumptions are we operating under?”
This isn’t bureaucracy.
This is maintenance of the substrate.
The quieter the work,
the more essential it is.
You already have Context Stewards — they’re just unofficial and overburdened
You know exactly who they are:
the one PM who always knows the real constraint
the engineer who remembers why something was designed that way
the analyst who can reconstruct the logic behind a metric
the designer who explains what a strategy slide actually means
the operations lead who keeps all the tacit knowledge alive
the person everyone CCs “just in case”
These people aren’t lucky.
They’ve become accidental Context Stewards.
Every organization has them.
None are recognized.
All are exhausted.
Imagine what would happen if the role were explicit, supported, trained, and empowered.
Because the truth is simple:
You can’t fix Information Dysfunction unless someone is responsible for maintaining the information architecture of meaning.
That someone is a Context Steward.
So what do we do about it?
Three simple steps:
1. Identify who is already doing this work informally.
They’re hiding in plain sight.
2. Give them protection, clarity, and authority.
If they can’t challenge drift, decoherence, or dilution, they can’t steward context.
3. Treat Context Stewardship as a core management function.
Not a nice-to-have.
Not a soft skill.
Not a secret skill.
A structural role
for a structural problem.
If ID is the diagnosis, Context Stewards are the cure.
Tools won’t solve ID.
Dashboards won’t solve ID.
AI will make ID worse until its meaning layer is fixed.
Context is the substrate on which all decisions depend.
And stewards are the people who maintain that substrate.
Organizations that don’t have Context Stewards
drift, dilute, decohere, decay, and duplicate.
Organizations that do have them
flow.
That’s the difference.