The Diraaya Approach to Contextual Strategy

Strategy is often imagined as a movement from objective to plan. An institution defines where it wants to go, analyses the available information, selects priorities, and assigns actions.

This sequence can produce clarity, but clarity is not the same as understanding.

Institutions do not act within empty environments. They act within histories, relationships, cultures, systems, expectations, and constraints. A strategic choice that appears logical from one perspective may generate unintended consequences when placed within this wider reality.

Contextual strategy begins from the proposition that context is not background information. It is part of the substance of the strategic question.

What makes strategy contextual?

A strategy becomes contextual when it is shaped by close attention to the conditions in which it will be interpreted and applied.

This includes formal conditions: policy, regulation, resources, structures, and institutional mandates. It also includes less visible conditions: trust, memory, language, identity, informal authority, organisational habits, and the assumptions people carry about what is possible.

These dimensions are often separated. Strategic planning may focus on objectives and resources, while cultural analysis is treated as a communications concern. Community experience may be gathered through consultation but remain peripheral to decision-making. Institutional history may be acknowledged but not examined for how it continues to shape behaviour.

Contextual strategy brings these forms of knowledge into relation.

It does not reject evidence, planning, or clear choices. It asks that they be interpreted within the realities through which a strategy must live.

The problem behind the presented problem

Institutions often begin strategy work with a defined problem: participation is low, a programme is underperforming, a partnership is strained, trust has declined, or a service must expand.

The presented problem may be accurate, but it may not be complete.

Low participation could reflect poor communication, but it could also reflect mistrust, inaccessible language, conflicting incentives, or a history of consultation without consequence. A strained partnership may appear to be a governance issue while being sustained by unspoken differences in expectations, status, or institutional culture.

Before moving toward solutions, contextual strategy examines how the problem has been framed.

Who defined it? Which evidence is considered authoritative? Whose experience is absent? What explanations have become normal within the institution? What becomes possible when the question is described differently?

Reframing is not an intellectual exercise detached from action. It changes the range of actions an institution can imagine.

Five interdependent movements

The Diraaya approach is organised around five movements: Attend, Situate, Interpret, Act, and Return.

They are not a linear series of stages. Each movement informs and reshapes the others.

Attend

Attention is the beginning of contextual strategy. It requires slowing the movement toward a predetermined solution long enough to understand what is present.

Attention includes listening to people, examining available evidence, noticing contradiction, and identifying what appears to be missing. It also includes attention to the institution's own language. The words used to describe a challenge often reveal assumptions about responsibility, value, and possibility.

To attend is not to remain passive. It is to resist premature certainty.

Situate

Questions do not emerge in isolation. Situating places the strategic issue within its institutional, cultural, historical, relational, and political setting.

This movement asks how the present became possible. Which previous decisions continue to shape the situation? What relationships influence action? Which formal and informal systems matter? How is the issue understood by different groups?

Situating also requires examining the strategist's own position. Every analysis is shaped by a standpoint, a disciplinary tradition, and assumptions about what counts as knowledge.

Contextual strategy becomes more rigorous when these assumptions are made visible.

Interpret

Evidence does not speak without interpretation. Different people may encounter the same information and understand it differently because they are responding to different histories, responsibilities, and consequences.

Interpretation brings quantitative evidence, institutional knowledge, lived experience, cultural understanding, and professional expertise into conversation.

The aim is not to eliminate difference or force all perspectives into a single account. It is to understand where interpretations converge, where they conflict, and what these differences reveal about the strategic environment.

This movement is often where a more accurate strategic question emerges.

Act

Contextual strategy is not an argument for endless analysis. Understanding must move into practice.

Action translates interpretation into choices, structures, experiments, programmes, or institutional commitments. These actions should be sufficiently clear to guide responsibility while remaining responsive to what is learned through implementation.

A contextual approach favours grounded action over abstract perfection. It asks what can be done responsibly within present conditions, what relationships must support that action, and what consequences require attention.

The quality of action depends not only on its technical design, but on whether it is intelligible and legitimate to those involved.

Return

Every action changes the context in which the next decision will be made.

Return is the movement of revisiting the strategy after it meets reality. What happened? What was interpreted correctly? What was missed? Which assumptions no longer hold? What new knowledge has emerged?

Return transforms evaluation from a final judgment into an ongoing source of understanding.

It also establishes humility as a strategic capacity. Institutions must be able to revise without treating revision as failure. A strategy that adapts intelligently may be more rigorous than one that preserves consistency while losing relevance.

Relationships are part of the strategy

Strategies are often presented through objectives, activities, indicators, and timelines. Yet institutional action is carried by relationships.

A strategy may depend upon cooperation between departments that do not trust one another. It may require communities to participate after previous experiences of exclusion. It may ask staff to exercise judgment within a culture that has historically discouraged initiative.

These are not peripheral implementation risks. They are strategic conditions.

Contextual strategy therefore maps relationships alongside resources and responsibilities. It considers where trust exists, where authority is contested, how information moves, and which actors can interpret between different institutional worlds.

Relational intelligence helps leaders understand not only the visible structure of a system, but how that system is actually experienced and navigated.

The role of language

Language shapes what an institution can see.

Terms such as development, capacity, participation, resilience, leadership, and impact may appear shared while carrying different meanings across teams, communities, and intellectual traditions.

Contextual strategy pays attention to these differences. It asks how key concepts are translated, what values they contain, and whether the language of the strategy reflects the realities of those expected to enact it.

Working across languages can expand strategic imagination. Arabic intellectual and linguistic traditions, for example, contain distinctions concerning knowledge, responsibility, consultation, relationality, and flourishing that may challenge or deepen established strategic categories.

Language is therefore not merely part of communicating a strategy. It participates in forming the strategy itself.

From document to practice

A strategic document can create alignment, but the document is not the strategy.

Strategy lives through decisions, relationships, routines, resource allocation, and interpretation. It must be understood by the people carrying it and credible to those affected by it.

This requires more than dissemination. Teams need opportunities to interpret what the strategy means within their responsibilities. Leaders need ways to identify tensions between strategic commitments and institutional systems. Communities and partners need routes through which their experience can continue to inform implementation.

The strategy should remain connected to inquiry after it has been approved.

Context as a discipline

Contextual strategy is not an argument that every situation is unique and nothing can be learned across cases. It is a discipline for determining what can travel, what must be adapted, and what requires a different starting point.

Frameworks remain useful. Evidence remains necessary. Expertise remains valuable. But each must enter into relationship with history, language, lived reality, and institutional purpose.

The result is not a less decisive form of strategy. It is a more grounded one.

A contextual strategy enables institutions to see their environment more clearly, understand the relationships through which change becomes possible, and act with greater attention to consequence.