AI is supercharging legacy leadership assumptions about context and control.

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Tech Lead Digest

AI is reinforcing a flawed assumption in leadership and knowledge work: that context is a package that can be assembled, transmitted, and pooled to produce understanding. Drawing on the Shannon-Weaver communication model and 4E cognition theory, the argument is that context is not pre-existing information to be shared but something that emerges through interaction itself. This has direct implications for leadership — effective alignment isn't achieved by cascading information downward or aggregating it upward via LLMs, but through dialogue, backbriefs, and continuous engagement. Context engineering, especially in complex settings, is fundamentally interaction design, and leaders are therefore interaction designers.

TBM 406: Seeing Everything, Understanding Nothing (The Context Trap)