A distinction Doshi draws for skills like high agency: "It can be learned but it cannot be taught. There's a difference between learnable and teachable." Learnable skills are acquired through lived experience and practice; teachable skills can be directly transmitted through instruction. Treating a learnable skill as if it were teachable — trying to lecture someone into having it — doesn't work.
Doshi extends the same logic to care/engagement among engineers and designers in a PM Guided culture: it "cannot be taught or forced onto anyone," illustrated by how children (or siblings raised in the same environment) naturally differ in how much they care. This reframes agency not as a switch a leader can flip for someone else, but as a capacity that only accrues through the person's own repeated experience.
The same learnable-not-teachable pattern shows up in PM Culture Taxonomy: Serviced, Dominated, Guided: genuine care/engagement in engineers and designers — a marker of PM Guided cultures — "cannot be taught" and "cannot force on anyone," comparable to how children or siblings naturally differ in how much they care about something. When evaluating a team's culture, look for visible signs of engineer/designer engagement rather than assuming it can be instilled through process or mandate.
Chandra's own career illustrates the distinction's stakes: at Zynga he never had to build strategic skill deliberately, because the org's strategy was already deeply embedded around him — 'a fish doesn't know it's in water.' He only recognized the gap when he moved to Headspace, where no comparable strategy existed and he had to build the skill for the first time. Strategic skill can go unbuilt for years inside a strategy-rich org, and only surfaces as a gap once that scaffolding is removed.