Yes and no provide the most obvious options to answers for questions ranging from "Does the car have gas?" to "Will the report be done by Friday?"   Or, as a parent, asking your son or daughter, "Have you cleaned your bedroom today?"    For program and project managers, looking at the dozens, if not hundreds of tasks they are coordinating, yes and no provide the most obvious answers to questions they might ask about each task being completed.   Such is the focus of Compliance Excellence.  The task is either complete or incomplete, pass or fail.   A part or component receives the quality stamp of "good" or "bad."   There are no "shades of gray" when it comes to Compliance Excellence.

In consideration of contextual awareness, do all affirmative replies deliver the same results?  Is there variation in how one cleans a bedroom?   Or, in the spirit of Compliance Excellence, are the results identical?   While everyone who graduates from medical school is technically a doctor, are all doctors the same?  As with Second Lieutenants graduating from West Point, are they absolutely interchangeable or relatively interchangeable?   While an automobile "has gas" with both a full tank and a quarter of a tank, these volumes represent two of the infinitely different volumes of gas in the car, if one allows for decimal places.

In contrast to Compliance Excellence, Contextual Excellence divulges shades of gray and, thereby, provides utility in the ultimate use of interdependent parts, components, and tasks.   From building rocket engines to operating a city government, what opportunities could be revealed by actively managing the use of Compliance Excellence and Contextual Excellence, realizing the role of each?