What could Kobe Bryant have taught you about being a better CEO? What can you learn from Bill Belichick about driving your team’s performance? With their shared focus on performance and winning, and because our brains are wired to think in analogies and metaphors, it’s quick and easy to draw comparisons between sport and business leadership. But it can also be lazy and problematic.

The late psychologist Robin Hogarth defined two different types of learning environments, which he called “kind” and “wicked.” Sports, disciplines like chess, and subjects like learning languages or math take place in kind learning environments, which are characterized by clear, known rules and quick, accurate feedback. What worked well this time will likely work well next time. It’s not that some of these pursuits aren’t tough and require outstanding levels of grit, determination, and resilience — the right ‘mindset’ — to perform at the highest levels, but the rules of the game are fixed, the outcomes of actions are evident, and feedback is fast and clear.

Business leaders, on the other hand, operate in wicked learning environments. In these environments, the rules of the game aren’t fixed. Information and feedback are messy, random, incomplete, ambiguous, inconsistent, unpalatable, or secondhand. The relationship between cause and effect isn’t known until afterward, maybe even several years later, if it can be established at all. What worked once may not work again. You can’t just know better or work harder. You have to be constantly scanning and adapting to meet the ever-changing dynamics of your people, organization, competitors, and market.

Looking at leadership and sports through this lens reveals some fundamental differences.

1. Constantly changing goalposts

Imagine if a minute before the gun sounded for the men’s Olympic 100m final, the runners were told that the race was now 200 meters and with hurdles. Imagine if just as javelin throwers began their run-up, powerful wind machines were activated at random intervals and directions. Imagine if before kick-off for the European Football Championships, the teams were told that they could field only five players each and that the width of the goalposts had been doubled.

Metaphorically, business leaders deal with these sorts of changing goal posts all the time. Hogarth used the analogy of “playing tennis on Mars” to emphasize that in many complex, real-world situations like business leadership, we might be playing a different game that we can’t prepare for in the same way.

Investment strategist, author, and professor Michael Mauboussin uses a terrain analogy to describe different environments, distinguishing between stable, coarse, and roiling “fitness landscapes.” In his book The Success Equation: Untangling Skill and Luck in Business, Sports, and Investing, he uses swimming to describe a stable environment in which you can optimize your behavior to serve the specific goal of refining your stroke to maximize speed. This works because the basic relationship between a swimmer and the water is sufficiently constant over time.

But optimization doesn’t work so well in a changing, roiling system. Mauboussin uses the example of an animal that evolved in a cold climate dying if the climate warms too much. Like the business leader in a rapidly innovating, competitive market, they must constantly adapt to all sorts of changing, often hidden forces to survive.

2. Rate of feedback

If a tennis player serves the ball into the net, she knows instantly that there’s a problem with her serve. If it keeps happening, she can try to work out what she needs to do to correct her serve. She can ask her coach to observe her and make suggestions. She can watch a video to try to pinpoint the problem. She can quickly understand what she is doing wrong and adjust her technique, repeating the process and relying on rapid feedback until she overcomes the problem.

Similarly, a golfer who keeps hooking the ball left also knows instantly that he hit a bad shot. When it ends up in the rough, out of bounds, or in the water, he knows that he needs to work on his swing. Like the tennis player, he can work with his coach and watch video feedback. While the mental game also plays an important part, both athletes can practice, practice, practice until they get it right.

3. Practice doesn’t necessarily make perfect

The concept of deliberate practice was coined by Swedish psychologist K. Anders Ericsson before being popularized by Malcolm Gladwell in his book Outliers: The Story of Success. Ericsson, who originally studied violinists, identified that by breaking down skills into manageable chunks, identifying weaknesses, and working systematically and with continuous feedback to address them for 10,000 hours or more, we could succeed at anything.

The gurus were quick to leap on this, telling us how Roger Federer or Tiger Woods applied deliberate practice to become world champions. They then rolled the principles of deliberate practice into business to explain how you could follow them to become the next Steve Jobs. But this is an over-simplification: Studies of deliberate practice focus on kind, rather than wicked, learning environments.

Deliberate practice can work well in business to develop foundational technical skills. Things like improving presentation skills, learning how to use a structured framework for giving feedback, or improving your financial modeling or programming skills can all take place in kind, stable environments that meet the criteria for deliberate practice. But while this type of rote learning and skill development will help you early in your business career, it won’t necessarily help you progress at a more senior level where a more adaptive skillset is needed.

The art of multi-disciplinary thinking

There are other differences between sports and business leadership. Athletes spend hours training to be prepared for their big performances. CEOs are afforded scarce training time; they must perfect their performance daily, on the job. A leadership career might last several decades and require sustained performance over a much longer period than the longest-serving athlete. Team sizes vary wildly between even the largest sports team and the largest corporation. Unlike a professional sports team, not all team members in a business can be “A Players,” and not all will want to be, but that doesn’t mean they’re not important team contributors.

There are also many commonalities and helpful lessons to be drawn, but to be effective multi-disciplinary thinkers, we must borrow the helpful and discard the less relevant from across many disciplines. Embedding your leadership philosophy in sports has both advantages and disadvantages — to achieve a metaphorical leadership gold medal, think about how to use the analogy wisely.

This article was commissioned by and first appeared on the Big Think.

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