Context — What Must It Have In Front Of It?
1. What must it have in front of it?
Context is what the system has in front of it, not how much it can hold.
Scope said what may be touched. Context says what the system needs to know before touching it. They are different documents and must stay different documents — that was Module 1's central warning. This module builds the one that guides.
Context — the standing material an AI-augmented workflow loads on every operational cycle so that its output fits the organization it serves.
| Component | Contains | You notice it is absent when… |
|---|---|---|
| Project rules | How work is done here — conventions, formats, sequence | Output is correct and unusable |
| Prior decisions | What has already been settled, and why | The same question is re-answered differently |
| Organizational standards | Quality bars, house style, terminology | Work needs rewriting to fit |
| Constraints | Regulatory, technical, political limits | Plausible proposals that cannot ship |
"On every operational cycle" is the load-bearing phrase. Context supplied once, at the start of a relationship, is onboarding. Context reloaded every time is infrastructure.
Why this is hard — and it is not a tooling problem
Michael Polanyi's observation, in The Tacit Dimension (1966), was that we can know more than we can tell. Much competent practice cannot be fully articulated by the person performing it, because it was never in propositional form to begin with.
That explains a misdiagnosis you will meet often. When AI produces work that is technically correct and obviously wrong to a practitioner, the missing ingredient is usually tacit knowledge nobody wrote down because nobody knew it needed writing.
Nonaka and Takeuchi call the conversion of tacit knowledge into explicit form externalization, and treat it as the hard, valuable step. A context package is externalization made operational — not documentation for colleagues who already share your background, but articulation for a competent stranger who shares none of it and will act on whatever is written, confidently, at speed.