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As I facilitate leader development programs, I urge participants to consider the concepts in context of their daily work. This is fundamental, especially to adult learning, since we learn best when we connect new information and skills to personal experience. There’s more to it, though.

I often pair this plea to think about context with one of my favorite refrains, “I am offering you tools, not rules.” Why? Because context matters.

The broad environment and conditions that influence or give meaning to a situation constitute its context, and it is dynamic. You may have been able to take an action yesterday that was fully embraced by your team, yet today, that action may be met with significant resistance by the very same group of people in the same office setting because something about the context changed.

This is a space in which I think leader development professionals like me could do better. We spend a lot of time focused on leaders’ self-awareness, and rightfully so. Leaders need to know their strengths, their hot buttons, their tendencies, and so on. To this, we should add a more deliberate focus on context-awareness.

This idea has come to the forefront of my thinking in recent days because I’ve been reading more and more research about artificial intelligence (AI). This has increased my belief in the importance of people-centered skills like context-awareness, among others, to complement technology.

Initially, AI was believed to be able to recognize patterns but not interpret them the way humans can, so it lacked context. Today, improvements in Generative AI lead to more human-like responses and claims that GenAI is learning context. Honestly, I am a little skeptical about that, but as I think about the identified programming challenges that slow the idea of context-aware AI, I am struck that some of these are challenges for our own context-awareness.

In particular, one reason AI struggles with context is that it often relies on limited data inputs, which can lead to biased or inaccurate results. Of course, an individual person has limited data inputs, too.

It is commonly believed that the human brain receives approximately 11 million bits of data per second, yet our conscious minds can process only about 50-75 bits per second. Just with that, we are missing a lot. More than that, though, our lives don’t bring us into contact with a wide enough variety of people or information to make us unbiased or wholly accurate – and that’s okay. We need to recognize this and take appropriate action.

Leaders who want to understand better, improve communications and decisions, shape their behavior appropriately, etc., need to be more intentionally aware of context. What is happening individually, socially, experientially, informationally, organizationally, culturally … you get the idea.

That’s a lot to consider, I know. Some things can be discerned fairly quickly through contextual clues. Other things might require asking questions, including those about intent and motivation. Human leaders can do things here that far surpass any AI tool, such listening and watching for displays of emotion, voice tone, body gestures, etc. This is all part of context-awareness. Honing skills such as these can make meaningful differences for all of us.

And, we can help leaders gain confidence in their abilities to be more transparent about their individual context – in a given situation, what’s on their mind, what factors are influencing their disposition, etc. Rather than force others to decode their context, leaders can state elements of it outright to increase the likelihood that they are understood as they intended to be.

Speaking of intent, another encouragement I offer leaders is to first presume positive intent. If a decision or conversation or action seems somehow off-putting (or worse), a good place for a leader to start, before simply reacting, is to ask themself what might they be missing about the context surrounding the issue. This is another area in which humans far out-perform AI; humans can be open-minded. Of course, it is a choice to be open-minded, and it is an important choice to be sure.

A final note: my suggestion around positive intent is to first presume it, yet not necessarily to stop there. Something else humans can do is manipulate, so caution is warranted when someone maintains that their actions or words were “taken out of context” and therefore should be excused. It could indeed be a genuine misinterpretation, or it could be a deflection. We all would be well-served to ask, “in what context would that be okay?” and to employ our also human gift of critical thinking to assess the situation further.