THE IMPORTANCE OF CONTEXT

What's most interesting is how many people don't understand the need and value of providing context.  Let me give you a simple example that I share all the time, yet, I rarely have people respond to my example, and that in itself is telling.

A company advertises a position for a controller and one of the criteria is ten years experience.  This is course is very common and has been for a very long time. Two people apply for the position, one has ten years experience, the other only five.  Let's assume that the rest is relatively equal, which one would you select, the most common answer would be the person with ten years experience.

  I come along and I ask you, are all experiences created equal, the answer of course is, No.  Then that begs the next question, what's more important, how long you've been doing something or how well, there's a significant difference.  When we ask this question, which has now placed context around the length of time, we discover that the person with 10 years experience has been a good performer, however, the one with five years experience has been outstanding, now, which one would you select, most would say, the outstanding performer.

Now this is a very simple example, but the ramifications of it could be significant, focusing on length of experience doesn't provide us with the best candidate.

The premise is quite clear as to how vital context is: without context, we immediately jump in our heads to what we want to say next, based on the very first few words we hear from the other person.  I've seen this happen countless times in conversations, where the listener wasn't listening to understand but focusing on what to say, thereby not having the right understanding and therefore providing the wrong advice.  

What throws most of us off is that we hear a story that is familiar and immediately our hard drive kicks in and we go to a similar situation we previously faced and then proceed to reply.  During that time we miss vital information that would have caused us to go on the wrong direction.  This of course brings us to a critical difference when it comes to listening, are you listening to understand or listening to reply.