The Context Big Bang
How information began scaling faster than meaning — and why every organization is still dealing with the fallout.
There’s a moment in organizational history we rarely talk about because it didn’t happen in a single year, or with a memorable event.
But its effects are everywhere.
It’s the moment when information began scaling exponentially, and meaning didn’t.
Tools proliferated.
Documentation exploded.
Channels multiplied.
Dependencies deepened.
Teams specialized.
Cycles sped up.
Everything accelerated except the one thing work actually depends on:
a stable, shared understanding of what’s going on.
I call this shift the Context Big Bang —
the point where organizations lost the ability to maintain coherence at the same rate they produced information.
The consequences were quiet at first. Now they’re unavoidable.
Organizations aren’t struggling because people don’t communicate well.
They’re struggling because information now moves faster than people can synchronize meaning or decision rights.
And that mismatch cascades.
Before the Big Bang: Why Work Used to Hold Together
Not because everyone was in the same room.
Not because management was better.
Not because culture was stronger.
Work used to hold together because context decayed slowly.
Assumptions stayed valid longer.
Roles didn’t shift weekly.
Plans didn’t get rewritten mid-flight.
Workflows remained stable.
Tools were simple.
Dependencies were limited.
And the organizational environment wasn’t changing faster than people could recalibrate their understanding.
Interpretation wasn’t perfect
—but it was manageable.
There were fewer layers where meaning could fracture.
That’s the world that ended.
What Actually Exploded
The Big Bang wasn’t the arrival of more information.
It was the arrival of more interpretive burden than human systems can absorb.
1. Information scaled. Meaning didn’t.
Every tool created artifacts.
None created shared understanding.
2. Visibility increased. Coherence decreased.
Dashboards show everything except the context required to interpret them.
Taleb would call this pseudo-order —
a polished surface hiding structural fragility.
3. Shared models dissolved.
Teams built their own mental models because nothing unified them.
Deutsch would say:
Data without explanation isn’t knowledge.
4. Decision rights drifted away from decision-making.
People had more information than ever
—and less clarity than ever about who could act on it.
Kahneman would say:
Noise defeated bias.
Leadership sets direction.
Teams interpret direction.
The gap between those interpretations grows faster than organizations can close it.
This leads directly to the Five D’s of Information Dysfunction.
The Five D’s: Structural Breaks in the Wake of the Big Bang
The Context Big Bang shattered coherence in predictable ways:
1. Divergence — the map no longer matches the terrain.
Plans and reality fall out of sync.
Decision-making follows outdated models.
2. Dilution — meaning weakens as it spreads.
Intent becomes implication, then suggestion, then ambiguity.
3. Decoherence — interpretations stop fitting together.
Teams use the same language but act from incompatible understanding.
4. Decay — rationale evaporates.
The organization remembers what was decided but not why.
5. Duplication — meaning gets rebuilt instead of reused.
Five versions of the same plan appear because the canonical one isn’t trusted or clear.
Together, these produce the sixth D:
Dysfunction — the visible surface of context collapse.
This is what ID names and diagnoses.
Why It’s Increasing — Not Stabilizing
Two forces accelerate ID faster than organizations can adapt:
1. Digital tools scale information, not interpretation.
Tools capture artifacts, not meaning.
They store decisions, not decision logic.
Clarity doesn’t survive round trips through a dozen systems.
2. AI accelerates the downstream and ignores the upstream.
AI summarizes, synthesizes, generates —
all downstream products of meaning that no longer exists upstream.
AI accelerates dilution, duplication, and decoherence
unless the underlying context layer is maintained.
Tools can’t fix meaning.
Automation can’t fix meaning.
Only coherence work fixes meaning.
Which brings us to the next evolution after the Context Big Bang.
After the Big Bang: The Rise of Context Stewardship
The Context Big Bang broke the hidden structure that used to hold work together.
We no longer live in systems where meaning maintains itself.
We live in systems where meaning must be intentionally maintained.
This requires a new layer of management — one every successful organization already has informally but almost none recognize:
Context Stewards: people responsible for maintaining shared reality.
Not note-takers.
Not PMs.
Not chiefs of staff.
Not culture champions.
Stewards are responsible for:
preserving decision lineage
synchronizing interpretations
keeping rationale alive
preventing drift
stabilizing meaning across teams
ensuring decision rights match the information they’re meant to unlock
This is not a soft-skill role.
It’s structural work.
It’s the missing function created by the Context Big Bang.
If ID is the diagnosis,
Context Stewards are the cure.
Why This Matters
We’re entering an era where information density will keep increasing.
AI will amplify the disconnect unless the meaning layer becomes a first-class part of management.
The Big Bang set the stage.
ID made the problem visible.
Context Stewards describe the solution layer.
InContextable exists to make this shift thinkable
—to help people see the invisible structure beneath the work,
and give them the language and tools to repair it.
The Context Big Bang wasn’t the movement.
It was the rupture.
The movement is what comes next.