Context · Internal Context · External Context

Before deciding anything, a body situates itself in three parts: the general condition it finds itself in, what is inside its boundary, and what is outside it.

"Where are we?" is the first question of navigation and the one most often skipped, because everyone assumes they already know. These three word-tools slow it down enough to be answered honestly.

General context is the condition of the world the body is acting into — in the canon's own reading: centuries of real progress whose solutions are now generating new classes of problem, an interacting complex of crises that no single actor can meet, and an enormous amount of sincere effort running in parallel without coordination or shared sight (The Meta Crisis · Silos No More). That reading is what makes a meta-scale response look necessary rather than grandiose (The Meta Project).

Internal context is the body's current state of being inside its own boundary — its people, capacity, agreements, health, and what it actually believes about itself. It is the ground of who we are (Identity · Capacity · Field of Agreements).

External context is everything outside that boundary that bears on the work: neighbours, conditions, constraints, the people already doing something adjacent (Boundary · Selectively Permeable Membrane).

Together the inner and outer readings are the two halves of where we are on the way to where we are going, and the canon states plainly that understanding both is the key to self-governance for any vessel a body is navigating (Sensemaking · Navigation · Governance).

The split earns its place because the two readings fail differently. A body that reads only its internal context builds beautifully and irrelevantly. A body that reads only its external context becomes reactive, shaped entirely by what is happening to it, and loses the thing it was for. The discipline is to take both readings, separately and on purpose, before the question of what to do is allowed to arise (Observe · Orient · Decide · Act · Learn · Sensing comes before understanding).

Also called: context · internal and external context Stands on: Sensemaking · Boundary · Navigation · Word Tools Opens onto: Observe · Orient · Decide · Act · Learn · Sensing comes before understanding · Identity · Capacity · Selectively Permeable Membrane · Guard the Membrane · The Meta Crisis · The Meta Project · Silos No More · Who We Are · Where We Are · How We Got Here · Where We Are Going · Who We Are Going With · Why · Field of Agreements · Discernment In play: the table — read at the opening of a season, before a Quest is chosen Sources: Context (root page, draft, twenty-eight lines — substantial, and largely an argument for the Meta Project) · Internal Context (root page, four lines) · External Context (root page, three lines) · lionsberg.wiki: Context Open: The parent page is mostly a case for a meta-scale response and only glancingly about context as an instrument; the two child pages are stubs. The concept is better than any of its three pages. · The canon's Sensemaking row carries "where we are" and does not carry the inside/outside split, so the three pages and that row overlap without either being the home. · Nothing states how often the readings are retaken, or what triggers a re-read between turnings.