This article is a reproduction of an article published in HindSight magazine issue 35 in September 2023 (all issues available…
Tag: context
In this post, I describe four roles for the spread of new ideas, and reflect on corresponding ego traps or shadow roles.
All human activity, along with associated emergent problematic situations and opportunities, is embedded in context. The ‘context’ is, however, a a melange of different contexts. An approach that I have found useful is to spend time considering contextual influences (e.g., on decision making, at multiple levels of organisations) on problematic situations or potential solutions, more explicitly.
Most organisations seem to use a classification system (or taxonomy) of some sort, for instance for safety classification, and much time is spent developing and using such taxonomies. Importantly, decisions may be made on the basis of the taxonomy and associated database outputs (or it may be that much time is spent on development and use, but little happens as a result). There is therefore a risk of time and money spent unnecessarily, with associated opportunity costs. Still, taxonomies are a requirement in all sorts of areas, and several things should be kept in mind when designing and evaluating a taxonomy. This posts introduces twelve properties of effective classification systems.
Humanistic Systems 