Context Engineering

I used to describe my work in venture, advisory, and product as “systems thinking” or “narrative strategy.” Yet every time a portfolio founder thanked me, it wasn’t for a killer spreadsheet or an intro to capital, it was for clarity. I’d reframed their world so the next move felt inevitable.

That’s when it hit me: I’ve spent years across Cool Climate Collective, Ikigaia, and at my own companies, engineering context. Giving messy possibility a structure sharp enough to slice through noise is my real craft.

And as AI agents proliferate, that craft is about to become table stakes.

Context Engineering = Intentional design of information environments to accelerate understanding, decision-making, and aligned action.

It’s not data wrangling. It’s meaning-making… tuning the signal to the moment, the mission, and the mental model in the room (or inside the model).

Done well, it:

1. Enhances understanding – surfaces the “why” behind the metrics.

2. Accelerates decisions – removes cognitive friction.

3. Shapes behavior – frames incentives and emotional resonance.

4. Aligns perception with deeper truths – the story behind the story.

• LLMs & Agentic Workflows
  Prompt engineering was the appetizer; context engineering is the feast. When models become autonomous, whoever defines their frame of reference owns the outcome.

He who controls the context, controls the cognition.

• Overload → Orientation
  Information is infinite; trusted orientation is scarce. Investors, customers, and teammates don’t need more dashboards, they need the lens that turns chaos into choice.

• Foresight at Scale
  Great strategists have always seen the narrative beneath the chessboard. Codifying that intuition lets us inject foresight into climate, defense, and venture… where stakes and timelines are existential.

At least from my own experience…

• LLM Workflows – Prompt + memory + tool chains that return not just answers but aligned answers.

• Policy Advising – Translating bureaucratic jargon into narratives a mayor, or an asset allocator, acts on.

• Product Strategy – Tesla isn’t a car company; it’s an energy platform. That’s context engineering.

• Foresight Studios – My work in the Catalysts program: turning fringe tech into “of course” investments.

• Context Maps – Mental models stretched across time and stakeholders.

• Memory Graphs for LLMs – Teach the machine what to forget and what to amplify.

• Scenario Layers – Slides that reveal how one policy shock reshapes three industries.

• “What Changed?” Engines – Automated deltas that spotlight inflection moments.

• Dynamic Ontologies – Living taxonomies that update with every weak signal we ingest.

• Chief Narrative Officer – Guardians of a company’s master frame.

• Systems Foresight Lead – VCs who truly fund futures

• AI Experience Architect – Designing context loops for autonomous agents.

• Crisis Frame Strategist – NGOs rewriting the story mid-disaster.

• Portfolio Context Strategist – My daily hat: ensuring each startup sits in the macro narrative that unlocks capital, talent, and policy tailwinds.

If AI = Intelligence, then Context Engineering = Wisdom,
And we need wisdom to scale across industries and systems.

So the next time you marvel at a startup that “came out of nowhere,” or a deck that lands like prophecy, remember: someone engineered the context first.

I just finally put a name to what I’ve been doing all along. Now I’m hoping to spread this framework/mental model, so others can, too.