Design for How People Build Skills

4 Analyzing the Context of the Skill

In which we learn that context matters and that what works for making pancakes may not work for surviving a helicopter crash.

Context and Transfer

All skills exist within context, which is one of the reasons that skills inventories are problematic. Leadership skills learned in one context may or may not transfer to another context.

For example, would leadership skills learned in a business environment translate to a non-profit environment?

I was having a conversation with a colleague who worked in a small non-profit organization. Her organization had a new executive director who had been a very successful leader in business and had recently moved to the non-profit. The new director had a very businesslike, ...