Pondering on learning to cross talk

Hi subscribers! The bi-weekly Thursday posts have been a bit spotty because... well, time flies when you're camping out in a construction zone in between taking the kid to school and having meetings while saws and hammering are going on a couple of meters away. If the construction crew keep finding new century-home horrors hiding in my walls I'm seriously going to have to consider some brief consulting gigs to make the pipes meet.

Despite the ridiculous amounts of stress and cost involved in doing a major kitchen upgrade that involves removing a structural element, one thing that's been interesting is talking to the various tradespeople that have to come do things like framing, plumbing, electrical, and others. Who would have thought that the technical drafting and CAD classes my high school required us to take would be so useful. Same for the hundreds of hours I've spent learning about DIY repairing all the things that broke at home.

Having just that basic, entry level knowledge of terminology and fundamentals made communication with those folks as issues came up so much easier for everyone involved. A question like "do you need the shower drain centered, it's right over the joist" can instantly be understood as "it's gonna cost extra labor for something mostly cosmetic". Same goes for having to make changes due to building code compliance, or any of the million other tiny details involved in building a habitable space. A little knowledge goes a surprisingly long way.

In data work, we do this similar kind of thing all the time when working with people in other fields and teams. This cross-field communication is an important skill to build because we are typically forced to work between teams.

But my interest is in just how much shared knowledge do you need to get this effect? More is obviously better, but no one's got the time for deep diving into every single topic they come across. There's got to be some kind of minimal threshold of language, jargon, cultural norms and values that needs to be understood before you can start anticipating what these people will need.

And so, I've got a completely unfounded theory in my head that the amount of knowledge needed to communicate with someone in another field is similar to the roughly 6 months needed to understand what's going on when you start a new job. Whatever you can manage to earnestly cram into your brain over the course of 3-6 months doing work surrounding a topic feels very similar to the point where you finally understand why people talk and work the way they do. It's like learning a language through immersion by moving to another country – over time you'd be exposed to the most common bits of language relative to the most everyday parts of life.

I have no idea if there's any literature on this, "how long does it take to learn to communicate in a field of study" notion.... It's probably buried under some learning/knowledge acquisition concept that I don't know the name of. So if anyone happens to have an idea of where I can look to understand it, that'd be great. It'd nice to know if there's an inflection point somewhere that allows communication to become better. Then I'd know to what extent I should be encouraging people to stick with working in uncomfortable cross-team situations in hopes that they'd absorb enough for things to 'click'.