When context clicks

I had one of those conversations today where, at first, nothing landed. We were discussing whether we could allow orders for items still in transit by estimating when they’d arrive, be received, and be ready to pick so that customers could buy them before the warehouse technically had them “in stock.”

I was tracking along, but not connecting it… until one term surfaced: ATP. I didn’t know what ATP was until someone explained it me.

At Gordon Food Service, ATP (Available to Promise) refers to product that’s been unloaded at the loading dock but hasn’t yet been slotted into a pick location. In other words: present at the distribution center, not yet pickable. This concept instantly transported me back to a rush-order pilot I worked on last year with Instacart. We were doing something novel: enabling rush orders directly from our Distribution Centers. Along the way we discovered a subtle trap: some items were “available to promise,” but not actually available to pick. They’d been received at the dock but not slotted. Customers could order them; associates couldn’t pick them. Same building, different reality.

That prior experience became the anchor. The moment ATP came up today, the whole discussion clicked into place. The new concept, “sell in-transit inventory when timing makes sense,” latched onto an old lesson: “availability states matter.” My mental model updated with this connection immediately.

Anchor Moments and “Conceptual Adjacency”

I think of these as Anchor Moments: a familiar node in your experience graph that lets a new idea connect quickly and securely. You can also think of it like a “birthday paradox for concepts.” In the birthday paradox, you don’t need 366 people to find two with the same birthday. With just 23, there’s a 50% chance two share a birthday. Similarly, as your set of real-world experiences grows, the odds of a useful connection to an existing experience or concept (an anchor), rise quickly. Once that connection appears, learning accelerates.

Over the past three years at GFS, I’ve collected a lot of individualized experiences across teams and domains. Each one felt isolated at first. But the more nodes I add, the more often I feel that “click.” That’s when I can add real value. By seeing how decisions in one domain ripple into another, or by recognizing a pattern early because I’ve seen its shadow somewhere else.

Why this matters (beyond a nice feeling)

  • Speed: Anchor Moments compress onboarding and analysis time. You ramp faster because your brain has more attachment points.
  • Quality: You spot edge cases sooner (e.g., “available to purchase” != “available to pick”).
  • Trust: When you can translate across domains such as ops, data science, product, etc. people experience you as a connector, not a bottleneck.

How leaders can manufacture more Anchor Moments

  • Deliberate rotations: Short stints shadowing adjacent teams (receiving, slotting, picking, replenishment, transportation planning) build sticky context. I had the joy of riding along with one of our truck drivers a couple months ago, and that experience created countless “anchors” in my mental model.
  • Journaling: Write these findings down. Tell the story (see what I’m doing here?).
  • Concept glossary: Maintain a living glossary in the team’s workspace. Define acronyms and show how terms differ across systems (“ATP” may mean different things to different groups. Call it out).
  • Story bank: Capture short “field notes” from projects: the problem, the insight, the fix. These become future anchors for others.

Closing

We often think expertise is about mastering more facts. In practice, it’s about building a graph of experiences so new information has somewhere to attach. That’s what today’s conversation reminded me: when context clicks, contribution follows.