Why IN-CONTEXT-ABLE Exists
Finding coherence across the silos
If you’ve noticed that your organization has more data than ever but less sense than ever, you aren’t imagining it.
I’m Alex Cooper. I use this site to document the gap between how systems are designed on paper and how they actually function in the room. This isn’t a consulting pitch; it’s a collection of observations on why modern work can feel like a “Hamster Wheel” and how we might find a bit more coherence.
The Core Principle: 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 usually finding the data; it’s deciding which truth matters most right now.
[Image: Necker Cube]
What I’m Noticing
If you are new here, start with the observations that match the specific glitches you are currently seeing:
Intelligence vs. Integration: Why we mistake the “pipes” (APIs and Cloud) for actual shared understanding.
The Human Middleware Tax: A look at what happens when humans act as the manual “glue” between tools that don’t talk to each other.
The Map and the Territory: Why we sometimes prioritize the spreadsheet even when it feels disconnected from what we’re seeing on the ground.
Read: The Big Lie of Big Data
The “Nth Power” Problem: My suspicion is that adding AI to a context-starved organization won’t fix the mess—it will just scale the confusion.
A Practical Step: Dissing the Default
The most direct way to reclaim a bit of logic is to recognize where a system—or a software vendor—is making your decisions for you. Dissing the Default is the practice of noticing pre-selected settings and deciding if they actually work for you.
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.