Most bad decisions don’t come from a lack of intelligence. They come from skipping context. You’ve seen it. Someone asks a question that sounds clear:

“Should we do product-led growth?”
“Should we hire an enterprise seller?”
“Can you help sharpen our marketing story?”

Within minutes, smart people start handing out solutions. That’s the moment you should get suspicious. Not because solutions are bad. But because most teams are solving the question while the problem is still undefined.

The most expensive mistakes come from answering too quickly, before you’ve earned the right to answer. This is about context as a discipline: how to build it, how to test it, and how to stop copying other people’s playbooks when the boundary conditions are different.

The Core Mistake: Confusing the Question with the Problem

Here’s a clean distinction:

A question is language.
A problem is a structure in the real world.
Context is the map between them.

Without the map, your brain does what brains do: grab the nearest familiar pattern, borrow a playbook you’ve seen work elsewhere, follow your identity bias, move toward what feels decisive rather than what’s true.

That’s how “best practices” turn into malpractice.

A Stricter Definition of Context

When people say “we need more context,” they often mean “we need more facts.” Facts help. But context isn’t a pile of facts.

A stronger definition: Context is the set of constraints, causes, incentives, and capabilities that determine which actions can work here.

That breaks into three buckets:

1. Decision context: What decision are we making, by when, and how reversible is it?

2. Problem context: What is actually happening? What causes what? Where is the bottleneck?

3. Solver context: Who is trying to solve it? What are they good at? What do they avoid? What noun can they credibly own?

Most advice fails because it’s heavy on tactics and light on these three.

A Real Story: The Missing Center

I get a call from someone I know. Someone I respect. They’re in a senior role at a Big Four firm, leading a major industry.

“We need help sharpening our marketing story. Can you come in for a conversation?”

I say yes. It’s familiar terrain: high-performing team, world-class expertise… and a message that doesn’t land.

But something feels off.

Before discussing messaging, I ask for internal materials: strategy docs, vision decks, and the operating model. Not because I want to nitpick slides. Because “messaging problems” are often “positioning problems” wearing a framing costume.

This distinction matters. Positioning is owning a concept in the customer’s mind, a noun they associate with you. Framing is how you articulate what you own. You can’t frame your way into owning a concept. You can only frame a concept you already own.

And what I’m looking for isn’t in the decks.

It’s not that the strategy is wrong. It’s that the center is missing.

So instead of preparing a slide presentation, I walk into the session with a marker and a whiteboard.

And I open with this:

“I’m not the expert in the room. I’m just a designer who asks questions. You’re the experts.”

Everyone nods politely. That’s what people do.

Then I ask the question that changes the room:

“What does our revenue target say about us?”

Silence.

So I add:

“Does it mean we want to be better than last year? Does it mean we want to be the #1 firm in the market? Or just… participate?”

That’s when it clicks. For the first time in a long time, the conversation stops being about tactics and starts being about intention.

Then I notice another pattern. They keep saying, “We’re the best.”

Over and over. It’s baked into the decks, the language, the way they talk to each other.

So I ask:

“What if we’re not the ones who get to decide that? What if it’s something the market decides?”

Pause. The room is listening now.

That’s when I offer a different angle — not as a solution, but as a challenge to the thinking:

“What if, instead of ‘best,’ we focused on being the easiest firm to work with?”

That phrase lands with weight.

It’s not spin. It’s the seed for an inside-out strategy. It’s a counter-stance against the default perception of large consulting firms: bureaucratic, slow-moving, rigid.

It’s simple. But it’s not superficial. It’s a philosophy.

Because if you actually believed: “We’re the easiest firm to work with…”

Then it would shape everything: how you engage clients, how you design processes, how you staff teams, how you scope work, how you handle change orders, how you communicate, how you show up in the market.

And only then does messaging become obvious.

That’s the moment the room shifts.

Leaders start riffing. Building. Owning the idea.

One exec says: “I’ve never seen this level of alignment and focus in this team.”

Another: “You’ve cracked what we’ve been struggling with for over a year, and you did it in under an hour.”

After the session, the person who brought me in says, “I had no idea you had these capabilities.”

Here’s the real lesson:

I didn’t give them a new narrative. I gave them a lens to re-see what they already knew but never aligned around.

Because “easy to work with” isn’t a tagline. It’s a noun you have to earn. And operationalize.

What is one year of confusion worth to your leadership?

What That Room Taught Me About Context

That meeting wasn’t “about marketing.”

It was about context.

Specifically, it surfaced four missing pieces that show up everywhere, from startups to large firms.

1. “Messaging” is often a symptom, not the disease

If the center is missing, the message can’t land because there’s nothing stable to communicate. You can rewrite copy forever and still feel vague because the positioning is vague.

This maps directly to the 4-Level Positioning Canvas. Most companies operate at Level 1 (Saying It) and Level 2 (Proving It): surface claims and evidence. But real positioning lives at Levels 3 (Being It) and 4 (Owning It): costly commitments and structural inevitability.

Framing without positioning is articulation without territory. Noise without substance.

2. Metrics without meaning don’t create alignment

A revenue target is not just a number. It implies a choice.

Are we trying to dominate? Modernize? Expand categories? Simplify delivery? Build a reputation for something specific?

The real question: Does this target serve the positioning, or does it dilute it?

A revenue target that requires chasing every deal contradicts “easiest to work with.” If the target doesn’t carry positioning intent, teams fill the vacuum with politics or habit.

3. “We’re the best” is not a position

It’s a self-assertion. And self-assertions are adjectives, not nouns.

The distinction matters. Adjectives describe qualities: innovative, fast, reliable, and best. They’re not ownable. Anyone can claim them. They force comparison instead of creating territory.

Nouns are concepts. Safety, convenience, simplicity, and the future. They create mental monopolies. When Volvo owns “safety,” competitors can only claim “safe too” or “safer than.” These derivative positions are inherently weaker.

Markets don’t reward self-assertion. They reward lived experience.

If you can’t operationalize “best” into behaviours the customer can feel, “best” becomes noise. Worse, it makes you sound like everyone else.

4. The strongest positioning is an operating model choice

“Easiest firm to work with” is only powerful because it forces operational consequences.

If you adopt it honestly, you have to do uncomfortable work: remove friction, shorten cycles, redesign handoffs, change staffing rules, tighten decision rights, invest in client experience, build tools and templates, and kill internal bureaucracy that clients can feel.

That’s context becoming action. That’s the gap between Glitter and Gravity.

Glitter vs Gravity: Why Context Work Matters

Traditional positioning work is Glitter: shiny, superficial, easily stolen.

It focuses on finding better words to describe similar businesses. It lives in PowerPoint decks, homepage hero sections and marketing campaigns. Competitors can copy it overnight. It requires constant reinforcement because it has no structural foundation.

Real positioning work is Gravity: dense, deep, expensive to escape.

It focuses on creating a dense mass at the company’s core that pulls everything (decisions, perceptions, competitors) into orbit. It lives in business model design, resource allocation, and organizational DNA. Competitors cannot copy it because doing so would require organizational destruction, not evolution.

Shallow context work produces Glitter: better words, same business.

Deep context work produces Gravity: structural inevitability.

Why People Jump to Solutions (And Why It’s Predictable)

Solution-jumping isn’t a moral failure. It’s a predictable shortcut.

Pattern matching feels like competence

If you’ve seen a playbook work, your brain wants to reuse it. That’s efficient. It’s also dangerous when the boundary conditions change.

Advice often equals identity dressed up as logic

This is the part most people don’t name.

People don’t only recommend what works. They recommend what they are.

Product-first people lean toward product-led growth, onboarding, activation, and loops. Enterprise sellers lean toward pipeline, procurement navigation, and complex deals. Operators lean toward process, cadence, and accountability. Brand/story people lean toward narrative, positioning, and community.

None of these are bad. But each is a biased lens.

In that Big Four room, “we’re the best” was partly identity. It’s what high-status expert organizations default to saying about themselves. It’s how they’ve learned to justify value.

But identity can’t substitute for context.

Operators can’t read their own labels

There’s a deeper reason context matters: founders and operators cannot see their own positioning from inside.

They experience success from inside and confuse tactical execution with strategic positioning. They know what they do. They rarely know what they own in the customer’s mind.

External perspective reveals the noun they actually own versus the one they think they’re building.

Context work creates that perspective.

Implicit Proof vs Explicit Claims: Why Actions Beat Words

There’s a cognitive reason why context work that uncovers operational proof matters more than messaging work.

Explicit positioning claims trigger defence mechanisms in customers. When you say “We’re innovative,” you trigger skepticism, counterargument, and recognition that this is a persuasion attempt. You force System 2 processing: slow, analytical, critical thinking that evaluates claims consciously.

Implicit positioning bypasses these defences. When every decision proves a concept without stating it, customers generate their own inferences. Self-generated conclusions are more persuasive than stated benefits. This works through System 1: automatic, emotional, instant thinking that operates below conscious awareness.

Costly Signalling Theory explains why: Actions are costly signals that anyone can verify. Words are cheap talk that anyone can fake.

When Patagonia donates profits to environmental causes, that’s a costly signal proving environmental commitment. When they run ads saying “We care about the environment,” that’s cheap talk.

Implicit proof through costly decisions creates credible positions. Explicit claims without structural proof trigger skepticism.

Context work reveals whether the company can prove its position implicitly (through decisions) or whether they’re trying to claim it explicitly through words.

The Remove All Words Test

Here’s the diagnostic that cuts through confusion:

Remove every piece of marketing copy. Delete every tagline. Strip away every claim. Take away all the words. What’s left?

If positioning is real, you see a pattern of decisions pointing to the same concept without stating it. Product choices, pricing, partnerships, and design all prove something implicitly.

If positioning is fake, you find confusion. The only thing holding the position together was the words used to describe it.

Examples that pass:

Burj Khalifa without signage still equals eminence.

In-N-Out without taglines still equals fresh quality.

Patagonia without messaging still equals environmental commitment.

Tesla without advertising still equals the future.

These positions survive because structural decisions prove them.

Apply this test before you polish messaging. If the position collapses without words, no amount of clever framing will save it.

True Context is 4D, Not Just More Detail

Real context means asking “stupid questions” and understanding the problem in four dimensions. Each maps to a different aspect of positioning work.

1. Time

Is this a now problem or a compounding problem? What happens if we do nothing for 30 days? 12 months?

Positioning implication: Real positioning takes 5-10 years to establish at Level 4. Some choices are correct at one stage and destructive at another. Framing can change in 3-6 months. Positioning cannot.

2. Incentives

Who benefits if we choose this path? Who quietly loses? If you don’t model incentives, the system will resist your fix and snap back.

Positioning implication: Level 3 (Being It) requires costly commitments that align incentives. Without structural commitment, positioning remains aspirational.

3. Causality

What do we think is causing the outcome? What evidence would disprove our story? If you can’t name a causal chain, you don’t have a problem definition. You have a headline.

Positioning implication: This maps to the inside-out/outside-in diagnostic. Inside-out (IQ) is the capability reality: what you can actually prove. Outside-in (EQ) is a market opportunity: what they need. The intersection is your positioning opportunity.

4. Identity and Capability

What can we do repeatedly without heroics? Where have we earned credibility? Where do we consistently underinvest because it’s unnatural for us?

Positioning implication: This is the “solver context” that determines which noun you can credibly own. A product-focused team will naturally prove “simplicity.” An enterprise-selling team will naturally prove “partnership.” Same market, different positions, because the solver is different.

The Context Ladder: A Process That Stops Bad Advice

Before you accept a question, run it up this ladder.

Step 1: What decision are we making?

One sentence. No poetry. Bad: “How do we grow?” Better: “Do we spend the next 90 days improving self-serve activation or closing 3 enterprise deals?”

Step 2: What does “better” mean?

Pick one primary outcome. Revenue in 90 days? Retention in 6 months? Sales cycle length? Pipeline quality? No measure = no clarity.

Step 3: What are the constraints?

Constraints define the feasible set: runway, headcount, trust/compliance risk, brand promises, and implementation capacity. If someone says “no constraints,” they haven’t looked.

Step 4: What have we tried, exactly?

Not “we tried marketing.” What changed? For whom? For how long? What moved?

Step 5: What’s the bottleneck hypothesis?

Force a hypothesis: “Demand exists, but onboarding leaks.” “Product is valuable, but positioning is wrong.” “Pipeline exists, but sales execution is weak.” No hypothesis = random tactics.

Step 6: Who are we as a solver?

What are we unusually good at? What do we avoid even when we “should?” Where do we have real leverage? What noun can we credibly own? This determines which positions are even possible for us.

Step 7: The Removal Test

If we stripped all messaging, what pattern of decisions would remain? Does that pattern point to a single concept? If not, the problem isn’t messaging. The problem is positioning.

Step 8: What costly decision would prove this?

What would we have to give up to prove this position? What revenue would we sacrifice? What opportunities would we refuse? If you can’t name a costly commitment, you’re at Level 1, not Level 3.

The Context Packet: A One-Page Anti-Confusion Tool

If you want better advice, require this before big discussions.

Element	Question	4-Level Canvas Mapping
The Decision	What must be decided in 1-2 weeks?	What level are we addressing?
The Goal	Metric + horizon	What position are we trying to own?
Constraints	What’s not allowed?	What prevents Level 3-4 integration?
Baseline Reality	What’s true right now?	What level are we currently at?
Attempts So Far	What did we try? What happened?	Did we confuse framing (L1) with positioning (L4)?
Bottleneck Hypothesis	What’s the constraint and why?	Where is the structural gap?
Solver Profile	Strengths, blind spots, identity bias	What noun can we credibly own?
Risk + Reversibility	One-way door or two-way door?	Level 3-4 decisions are one-way doors
Costly Commitment	What would we sacrifice to prove this?	Is this cheap talk or a costly signal?

If you can’t fill this out, you usually don’t need advice yet. You need truth.

Advice That Doesn’t Suck: Rules for Leaders, Advisors, and Operators

If you’re the one giving advice, these rules keep you honest.

Rule 1: Diagnose before you prescribe

No solutions for the first 10 minutes. Only questions. It feels slower. It’s faster.

Rule 2: Distinguish framing from positioning

When someone asks for “messaging help,” check: Do they have a position to articulate? Or are they trying to frame their way into owning a concept they haven’t earned?

Rule 3: Offer experiments, not edicts

Instead of “do X,” try: “Here are two options. Here’s what would have to be true for each. Here’s the smallest test to learn.”

Rule 4: Name your bias

“I come from enterprise sales, so I’ll naturally lean toward…” That doesn’t weaken your advice. It makes it usable.

Rule 5: Share boundary conditions with your playbook

Don’t just say what you did. Say what had to be true when it worked.

Rule 6: Ask the costly commitment question

“What costly decision would prove this position?” If they can’t answer, they’re not ready for tactical advice. They need strategic clarity.

The Real Point: Context Makes Ideas Executable

The Big Four story is the cleanest proof I know that context isn’t “background.” It’s the center.

When you restore the center:

Tactics become obvious.

Alignment appears without force.

Messaging stops being a word problem and becomes a truth problem.

Strategy stops being a deck and becomes an operating model.

Context is the antidote to cargo cults.

It’s how you avoid copying someone else’s strengths and calling it strategy.

And it’s how you stop wasting months arguing about tactics when the real disagreement is about intent, constraints, and identity.

So the next time someone asks for help (especially when they ask for help with “messaging” try the move that changed that room:

Ask a question that forces the center to show up.

What does our target say about us?

What noun do we want to own?

If we removed all our words, what would remain?

What costly decision would prove it?

Because being “easy to work with” isn’t a tagline. It’s a promise you operationalize.

And if you don’t do the context work first, you’ll pay for it later.

What is one year of confusion worth to your leadership?