Knowing How Things Work

 There are some real benefits in knowing how things work.

Jumping into something totally blind sometimes is fine, but only if you are there to learn it, or to enjoy it or, or just to take in the experience. But it’s always amateur-hour, the results might work out okay, but it is more likely they will leave some room to be desired.

Having a shallow overview might be okay sometimes, however being able to get right down to the details and see what is happening underneath is far, far better.

Most things that are complex are somewhat opaque from the outside. Their internal complexity can be counter-intuitive and built up over long and fractious histories. You need to know most of the parts, but it also helps to see how it all evolved, so that the exceptions make sense and fit back into the bigger picture.

There is no such thing as too much depth. There might however be too many details for any one person to cope with, so for very large and complex things, it is often necessary to specialize. A generalist can lead a bunch of specialists, but only if they are trusted and their advice heeded.  Thus one needs to know their limits: how much they know, how much they don’t know, and all of the little things that they think they might know, but really don’t. They need to know if they need someone else who knows more.

If you know how things work, you can make changes to them that have a much higher degree of continuing to work or actually improving stuff. If you don’t know how things work, then any changes you make will effectively cause random side-effects that you constantly are reacting to. That is terribly inefficient, somewhat dangerous, and there is no way of knowing once you start this, whether you’ll ever get it finished in a manner that is acceptable. 

Having an opinion about how things ‘should’ work is not the same as knowing how they actually work. And worse, opinions based on misunderstandings are more likely to be destructive, than helpful.

If you know how things work, then you know all of the changes that have to be made to achieve a certain goal. You also know how long it will take to make those changes. If it’s long-running work and you set a plan, then that plan will work out, in so long as there have not been any unforeseeable events. If the plan fails, it fails because of the things you didn’t know. Thus being able to successfully plan is a good way to prove that you actually know how things work.

It takes a lot of time to know how things work. It takes a lot of reading, and ingesting what you have learned, and then getting out there and experiencing stuff before you can really see how all of the pieces fit together. Learning from experienced mentors is the fastest way to get gain understanding. Learning from courses or textbooks is better at providing an overall view. Somethings can be known discretely, and that knowledge is definitive. Somethings can only be known as a sort of intuitive feel for how they will react in underlying difficult circumstances. You might know all of the parts really well, but are still not be entirely sure how they will react to a multi-dimensional set of changes. Most things require some form of balance, which is why oversimplifications tend to throw things out of whack. They favor one aspect of the problem over the others. 

Full knowledge is obviously the fastest and most effective way forward, but when that spans multiple people the team dynamics became an actual part of the thing getting changed, they are no longer separatable. Partial knowledge can be okay if it is accepted and account for, but you still have to find out about the unknowns and the unknown unknowns as well. 

A professional is someone who knows how things work for a given industry and can successfully reach any ‘possible’ goals. But they also know which goals are not possible, and which ones are unlikely. They know how to avoid failure.