The primary purpose of defining contexts is to establish and clarify Decision Rights within the enterprise.

To introduce our context, we set up clear boundaries between ourselves and the other contexts. These boundaries serve as “good fences” that help us be “good neighbors” with our adjacent contexts. To clarify our scope, we capture the following:

• Responsibilities - What does this part of the organization contribute to enterprise success?
• Leader - Who is the accountable person for this contribution to success?
• Assets - What enterprise assets does this leader “own”? (to maintain, change, and improve)
• Decision Authority - What decisions is this leader entrusted to make?
• Budget - How much funding has been allocated to fuel success?

A context serves as a node, in a network of contexts, that forms the enterprise. Each context positions itself in this network by defining relationships with other specific contexts:

• Parent context - this “vertical” relationship models the hierarchy that allocates responsibilities, authority, and funding
• Peer context(s) - this “horizontal” relationship models the exchange of value within the enterprise (to internal customers), and across enterprise boundaries (to external customers). Most contexts will have horizontal relationships with some contexts where they receive value from the other context, and other horizontal relationships with some other contexts where they deliver value to the other context.

Contexts will vary in size. Sometimes a single leader can drive a context. Other times, a leadership team will be needed to drive the leadership decision making in the context. When a leadership team is needed, each member of the team will be associated with the context, supporting the leader.

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Exercise:

• ‍HowTo: Create a Space for the Context

The leader works to clarify “what success looks like” for their part of the organization by defining a Mission and Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), that supports conversations across contexts on how this context supports enterprise success.

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Exercise:

• ‍HowTo: Create a Page for Mission and KPIs

Leaders are constantly interpreting the world around them: the world inside the enterprise, and world outside the enterprise where they compete for customers. The decisions they make are grounded in their sense-making of the world. These pre-existing Beliefs of what they see today, and what they expect to see tomorrow, are the scaffolding for strategic direction. A context must expose these Beliefs (and continuously challenge them), together as a leadership team, to build a shared understanding and foundation for decision making.

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Exercise:

• ‍HowTo: Create a Page for Beliefs

One very important note: the Context is intentionally decoupled from the teams that do the work. Contexts sponsor (read: fund) teams to do work, but teams are empowered to act autonomously and define their own work. Context leadership works with team leaders to define goals (as desired outcomes), so that teams can identify work and build plans to achieve those goals.

To make this work, contexts and teams lean on an organizational cadence to synchronize and align around goals and plans. We will assume two Ceremonies are in place (at a minimum), but in practice, there will be others as well, as needed.

• Quarterly Planning - a joint exercise between context leadership and teams, to align strategy to execution for the upcoming quarter.
• Weekly Decision Scrub - the context leadership actively manages a backlog of decisions-to-make, and maintains a throughput to support overall execution needs. Leaders prioritize their decisions based on importance and urgency (e.g. with an Eisenhower Matrix).

Exercise:

• ‍HowTo: Create a Page for Ceremonies

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