Context Is King

Over the last two decades I have hopped, skipped and lived in many houses. The count is more like 12 houses so far.

This has been partly driven by the job and geography rotations (some planned and some serendipitous ones) I enjoyed in my career, and partly driven by circumstantial reasons for instance, one of the houses got termite, one of them got sold while, and other such peculiar reasons.

Of these 12 houses, at least 6 have been in Delhi. Every time we moved into a new rented place in Delhi, we would wonder why is there so much woodwork. We wish there were more windows, ideally large French windows, a lot more open spaces. Seldom did we end up finding houses that meet the budget and spatial wish list.

The other day when I was discussing this at home it dawned on me that maybe that there was a trend to this. Most of the houses we looked at were built at least 30 years ago. Maybe it wasn't aspirational at the time to have open spaces because the generation then had plenty of such open spaces everywhere else in the city.
Therefore, for them, the yardstick of a great house wasn't necessarily open spaces but rather how well and how much woodwork was done-up in the house.

Often when we evaluate organizational policies or career decisions it's important to realize the context under which these were implemented. Each generation and time period have things that make sense at the time and are even aspirational. Evaluating these decisions or practices without weighing in the context will always make them look unfair or even silly.

For instance, our parents’ generation preferred government jobs and many spent their entire career working for one company. This was in the context of limited job opportunities, and a dormant private sector. Post liberalization, things have changed and now it's unthinkable to spend your lifetime working in one job. Likewise the Great Resignation Wave has a context behind it, and it’s unfair to judge it as wrong or right in the absence of that context.

Of course, with changing times we can and should always choose to modify what suits us to keep pace with our changing requirements.

Context is king.