Out of context

13/5/2025

‘Taken out of context, I must seem so strange.’ (Ani Difranco)

It’s an awareness of the context (in Gestalt psychology, the backdrop or ground) that often enables us to make sense of and navigate the specific issue (the focus or figure) in front of us. This principle came in useful today whilst facilitating a focus group of university research and teaching professionals in Scotland with cultural backgrounds in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Germany, Greece, Turkey and the UK. They knew their context well and were able to draw on insights from personal experience. This created the conditions for a rich conversation and diverse ideas to emerge.

There were benefits, too, to my involvement as an independent facilitator. In that role, I was external to their system – intentionally out-of-context if you like – and that helped me to avoid making some of the same assumptions, and to ask questions from a fresh place or guide the group’s gaze towards unexplored places. I was detached and unaffected by the issues they wanted to discuss and that helped me to stay focused: to help them discern their wood from their trees. So, out-of-context within a context can be an advantage; as can contextual knowledge and understanding.

9 Comments

Thomas Wilson

13/5/2025 09:38:16 pm

Interesting blog, Nick. I hadn't thought about the benefits of being "out of context" in that way before.

Nick Wright

15/5/2025 07:01:37 pm

Thanks, Thomas. I guess it's a flip-side benefit of something we might ordinarily consider as a down-side.

Gregor Owen

13/5/2025 09:40:56 pm

Hi Nick. I admire your ability to draw insights out of every experience. I think you have a great job and talent! Thank you for sharing with us.

15/5/2025 07:02:17 pm

Thanks Gregor - I appreciate your encouragement!

Claire Frost

13/5/2025 09:43:05 pm

I hadn't heard of Gestalt psychology for a while. Thanks for brining it back to mind. You've inspired me to get my Gestalt resources out again!

15/5/2025 07:04:05 pm

Hi Claire. Yes, Gestalt doesn't appear to be in-vogue at the moment. Nevertheless, it continues very much to inspire and inform my own thinking and practice. I hope you feel inspired as you revisit your own resources!

Dr Eleanor McLeod

15/5/2025 07:25:27 pm

Your blog post subtly evokes the paradox that sits at the heart of much intercultural and organisational learning research: the interplay between embeddedness and detachment, or as Clifford Geertz might say, being "both in and out of context." Your reference to Gestalt psychology aligns with current dialogic pedagogical approaches, which recognise that learning and meaning-making are not atomised acts but are shaped relationally through context and contrast. Recent literature on intercultural competence (Deardorff, 2020; Jackson, 2019) supports your assertion that contextual familiarity enables participants to contribute richly from personal narrative and lived experience. This idea is particularly relevant in academia, where the value of "positionality" is increasingly foregrounded in qualitative inquiry. When participants understand the cultural, political, and institutional ground from which their experiences emerge, they are more likely to offer insights that are both critically reflective and pragmatically relevant. Conversely, your role as the “out-of-context” facilitator echoes Schein’s concept of the “humble inquirer” (2013), who leverages outsider status to bypass assumptions that insiders may overlook. There is evidence in organisational development literature (Bushe & Marshak, 2015) that facilitators who maintain constructive detachment can enable groups to surface tacit knowledge and explore unexamined assumptions.

Your piece beautifully illustrates what Lave and Wenger (1991) termed “legitimate peripheral participation”, the idea that newcomers (or outsiders) can help reshape the centre by observing and asking from the edges. It is not neutrality, but rather a different kind of engagement, that brings value.

Nadiya Selim

15/5/2025 07:27:13 pm

I loved this Nick. It nails what so many overlook: sometimes the person who doesn’t belong is the one who sees the most. That “out-of-context” vibe? That’s a superpower. As someone researching third-space identities in academia, I get this. Outsiders can disrupt the script, ask the weird questions and see the structure that insiders are too close to notice. Also, props for bringing Gestalt into it: figure and ground are everywhere, especially in cross-cultural dialogue. Your blog reminded me that sometimes clarity comes not from blending in but standing out just enough to notice what others can’t. Thanks for writing this!

Alex Renn

15/5/2025 07:32:25 pm

What you describe makes a lot of sense to me as someone who’s worked in systems thinking and facilitation for over a decade. I’ve often found myself playing the “intentional outsider” and I’ve come to believe that this paradoxical position of being both engaged and detached is not only powerful but essential in unlocking meaningful dialogue.

Let me start with the Gestalt link, which is spot on. In facilitation, we’re always working with figure and ground, often without naming it explicitly. What people bring to the surface, their figure, is only ever meaningful when it’s understood in relation to the background conditions they inhabit. And too often, in complex organisations or intercultural groups, that backdrop goes unexamined. I’ve seen this in NHS leadership teams, in NGO boards and certainly in the education sector. The ground becomes invisible because it’s so familiar like the water a fish swims in. The moment we bring someone in who isn’t steeped in that context, they start asking the kinds of obvious questions that others might overlook. These aren’t naive questions; they’re what Edgar Schein would call diagnostic, a way of holding a mirror up to the system. Your blog brings that idea to life really nicely. It’s not that you, as a facilitator, were neutral. You had your own frameworks and ways of seeing but your distance allowed for focus. You were free from the emotional entanglements, the histories, and the internal politics.

And then there’s the cultural richness. The group’s shared contextual knowledge drawn from such diverse national and academic backgrounds must have been an incredible asset. Intercultural theory (see Hofstede, Trompenaars and more recently Darla Deardorff’s work) shows us how cultural variability can either be a source of misalignment or creative tension, depending on whether it’s named and worked with. It sounds like your group had enough mutual respect and shared purpose to harness those differences well.

I think there’s a lesson here for anyone working in organisational learning or change: diversity on its own isn’t enough. You also need structure, trust, and crucially a space apart in which people can see their own world anew. That’s the gift of the out-of-context facilitator. Not because they bring answers but because they bring better questions.

Thanks for this thoughtful piece, Nick. It’s a lovely reminder that seeing clearly often requires stepping back, or better yet, standing somewhere entirely different.

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