I’ve found that many times I’m presented with a challenge that I don’t know the specific answer to.  It may be some complicated technical setup, or changing how a relationship operates, or some new technology.  These scenarios are a bit exciting and a bit scary since I go into them not knowing the answer.

I’ve found that in order to succeed with tasks like this background conceptual knowledge is critical.  Understanding the basics of how a system operates allows me to more easily understand new areas of it.  After all, it’s still got to follow some basic rules. (Similarly if we understand a little bit about how gravity operates that makes it much easier to understand how something will fall, even if we’ve never seen that specific object before).

This can also be applied to softer skills.  If we consider each individual we interact with as having their own underlying “rules” for how they prefer or need to communicate we can then apply those rules to future interactions.  As we meet and understand more people our toolkit expands and we can begin to apply these rules to folks we’ve never met before… and succeed.

Find the common thread

The biggest challenge to making this work is to understand those basic rules.  This requires work.  You have to memorize and internalize terminology, where buttons are, what process flows exist.  Personally I find a three pronged approach to getting my brain up to speed; get the manual and read up, get hands on with the thing itself, and talk to others who know it already.

While reading documentation and studying documents can be tedious and boring this is a great way to understand how something works, especially when that documentation comes from the vendor or an expert in the field.  Documentation is great since you can go through it on your own time.  It doesn’t require others to be available or access to any new system.  It does, however, require time and effort.  Since it was written sometime in the past documentation can also feel disconnected from reality.  Due to this disconnection I tend to combine it with hands on discovery.

It’s hard to beat hands on experience to help drive learning, especially when combined documentation.  Being able to tinker and see things in action is an excellent reinforcement to learning.  Having the manual next to you as well lets you lookup what you’re actually doing.  This approach, however, can be frustrating if you run into a situation where you can’t progress because you’re missing something important.  This is where having someone who knows the system is very useful.

Talking to others about that system or interaction is also important.  There’s two main ways this can go - they know more about the system than you do, or they know about the general concepts (or both!).  The first will let you improve specific skillsets and learn the mechanics of that particular system.  This is great, especially when you’re first starting out since it helps increase your rate of skill gain.  The second helps you understand how to apply general concepts to different areas, which is also very important (especially if your role expands or changes).

In general you can’t really have TOO much background knowledge in any given subject.  The more you have, the more likely it is you can apply some of it to a challenge and come out on top.  It does take work to accumulate this information, but the effort is more than worth it.