The Context Gap
The distance between what the people setting direction know and what the people expected to deliver it know.
IN ONE LINE
People can only make good decisions with the context available to them.
Three minutes.
What it is
At the top of an organisation, decisions are made with access to information most people below will never see.
Market conditions. Investor expectations. Board priorities. Financial constraints. Strategic choices. Conversations that happened months before the decision itself.
Further down, people receive the result.
A target. A deadline. A new priority. A restructure. A change in direction.
They know what has been decided. They don’t necessarily know why.
That distance is the Context Gap.
It also runs the other way. The people doing the work know things the people setting direction cannot easily see: where a process actually breaks, which constraint is real, what customers are saying, what a team can absorb, and what an apparently simple decision will require in practice.
Both groups can therefore be making entirely rational decisions from incomplete pictures.
Information is not context.
Passing more information around does not necessarily close the gap. The useful question is whether people have enough of the right context to make good decisions from where they sit.
What creates it
Distance. The people setting direction and the people executing it operate in genuinely different environments. The further apart those environments become, the easier it is for each to underestimate what the other knows.
Different timescales. Senior decisions may be shaped by conversations and pressures developing over months or years. The people receiving them often encounter only the final decision.
Translation without context. Strategy travels downward as priorities, targets and actions. Somewhere along the way, the reasoning that made those choices coherent gets stripped out.
Reality that doesn’t travel back. Operational information moves upward, but the detail that would make it useful can disappear as it passes through layers of reporting and interpretation.
Assumed understanding. What is obvious to someone who has lived inside a conversation for six months can look arbitrary to someone encountering its conclusion for the first time.
How to recognise it
People know what they’re supposed to do but not why. They can repeat the priority but struggle to explain the choices behind it.
Decisions make sense from one level and look inexplicable from another. Both sides become frustrated because each is responding rationally to information the other doesn’t have.
Senior people get pulled into work that should not require them. Context lives with individuals rather than travelling through the system, so decisions keep returning to the people who hold it.
Teams repeatedly ask for clarification before they can move. The brief technically exists, but not enough of the thinking behind it travelled with the work.
The organisation produces different interpretations of the same direction. Functions make locally sensible choices that do not fit together because each is filling the missing context for itself.
The result can look like poor execution from above and poor leadership from below.
Sometimes neither is true. They are looking at different pictures.
What it gets mistaken for
Most often, a communication problem.
The response is therefore more communication: another town hall, another strategy deck, another cascade, another written update.
Those things can help people know more. They don’t necessarily help people understand more.
The Context Gap exists because the people setting direction and the people executing it occupy different environments, with different information and different timescales. Sending the same message more loudly does not remove that difference.
It can also look like a capability problem. Someone is given an outcome but not the context that shaped it, makes a reasonable decision from what they know, and produces something different from what the person above expected.
From above, that can look like they don’t get it.
From below, it can look like they keep changing their minds.
Both may simply be seeing things the other cannot.
Why it persists
Because context is difficult to see when you already have it.
Once you know why a decision makes sense, it is surprisingly hard to reconstruct what the decision looks like to someone who wasn’t part of the conversations that produced it.
The same is true in reverse. Operational reality feels obvious to the people living inside it. They can assume senior leaders understand constraints that those leaders rarely encounter directly.
So each side overestimates what the other knows.
And because work continues, imperfectly, with questions, escalation and local interpretation, the gap can remain hidden for a long time.
What becomes possible
Closing the Context Gap does not mean everybody needs to know everything.
It means people have enough context to make more decisions well without continually returning to the person above them.
That changes the economics of an organisation.
Senior attention is released from decisions that should never have required it. Teams spend less time interpreting what was meant, seeking reassurance and reworking things that were reasonable from the information they had. Decisions can happen closer to the work without becoming disconnected from the direction of the organisation.
And information improves in the direction too. Leaders make decisions using a picture that is closer to operational reality rather than discovering constraints after commitments have already been made.
The prize isn’t more information.
It’s better decisions without needing the same people in every room.
Where to start
Take one decision, priority or piece of work that keeps bouncing backwards and forwards.
Don’t ask:
Have we communicated this clearly?
Ask two different questions:
What do the people doing this need to understand to make good decisions without us?
And:
What do we need to understand about their reality before we decide what should happen?
The first sends context down.
The second brings reality back up.
You need both.
The Context Gap closes when information genuinely travels in both directions.
Last updated October 2026
