Abstraction and context

So, I gather that making a decision based on theory is abstract while making and applying the decision would be context. I thought of an example after reading his post. The upper management makes the decisions about packaging and maintenance of the Client's database which is an abstract view of the implementation. But when we, as database analysts, apply the strategy we find out different results and that is contextual.

Would that be correct?

You are finding out what actually works. We tend to think that what upper management is doing is analysis and it is. But it is a certain type of analysis based on abstract methods of seeing reality. Numbers are the one that come readily to mind. Analysis is based on numbers in the offices above, more often than not, and the assumption is that those numbers represent reality and represent the whole of reality. But they are abstractions only. Do they never match reality? No, they can but some times or at least they don't represent the whole of reality. The ones though who are on the front lines are in contact with that reality and can see readily if it will work or not. They are the ones in context.

Reminds me of the old story of a man who is out walking at night and comes upon a woman on her hands and knees under a street light evidently looking for something.

"What's the matter," he asks.

"I lost my ring and I am trying to find it," she says.

"Well, where exactly did you lose it?" he asks.

"Over there by that bench," she says pointing to a bench 30 feet away.

The man amazed says, "Well, why are you looking for it over here?"

"Because the light is better."

A lot of design considerations are made in the abstract. Computer modeling and simulations have narrowed the gap some between conception and reality but it still exists.20

The Challenger Commission investigated the accident of the shuttle by that name but a lot of it was intended as a whitewash of NASA. The problem was that they appointed a man named Feynman, a physicist and Nobel Prize winner. The panel was given all the statistics on the O-ring seal, all the test data on it and the gist of it all was that the O-ring could not have failed.

Feynman took a piece of that O-ring, put a clamp on it and placed it in a cup of water sitting on the table in front of him. He took it out a few minutes later and you could see with your eyes how the O-ring would not return to shape at temperatures near freezing. It was that ability, the ability to return to shape, that the shuttle depended on to seal the rocket boosters. Feynman showed the world that it could not do it.20

What the panel had been presented were abstractions, Feynman gave them context.

We shouldn't overplay the context issue because you cannot ever come to any generalizable conclusion if you do not engage in some abstraction. But there is really no risk that people will think purely contextually; we are made up to think abstractly. The problem is that we tend to take this too far along the continuum and prefer abstractions to anything else. In other words, the risk is that we might think purely abstractly instead. But thinking abstractly in context would be the ideal.

If you can see when you do it it will be a real help in your thinking.