Contextual Challenges

Sometime back when BBC started rehearsing the announcement of Queen’s demise, in case of an eventuality, it was seen as a proactive measure and also an attempt of to rectify the past, when one of their announcers goofed-upon big time during the death of another royal. Recently, however when they started rehearsing the possible death of the former British PM Tony Blair, many eyebrows were raised. Tony Blair is pretty young and is hale & hearty except for a minor heart scare in the past. He has three kids, with the youngest one born in the year 2000, when he was in-term. The BBC reportedly came in for a lot of flak when they started recording obituaries from the ex-colleagues of Tony. Too many steps forward or from being proactive to hyperactive! The next you know they may start recording advance obituaries for all their celebs & dignitaries and may be even for the English cricket team. Just to be future-safe, you see!
The ability to interpret contexts correctly and take suitable decisions has a lot of importance. At time certain contexts may appear similar, however they may only be so on the surface. The underlying dynamics may be completely different. As in the case of BBC, they made the mistake of looking at possible demise of Queen who is in her late eighties and that of Tony Blair, who although has a high degree of importance considering he has been the British head of state but his age & stage of life has no indication of similar eventuality in the near future, in the same light. Context is different from a situation. Context comes in a flash and disappears equally fast. However for the time that it lasts it has profound impact and hence reading and knowing how to deal with the same correctly is important. The worst thing that someone can do is to try and engineer a context, in the similar way that BBC tried to do in the case of Tony Blair.

Leaders have similar challenges confronting them. Reading and dealing with the contextual challenges goes a long way in deciding the future of organizations and engagement of its constituent stakeholders.