Obviously there are some fundamentals. When I was an instructional designer at Amtrak (the U.S. passenger rail service), I needed reasonably good skill at reading and writing English. It was helpful for me to have worked as a ticket agent and station supervisor, though those things weren’t essential to the instructional design job.

Nothing I have learned when I entered the job prepared me for my biggest assignment: managing the computer-based training for Amtrak’s new reservation system. I had taken one self-study course in CBT on a mainframe system that was not the one used for reservations — that made me the most highly qualified CBT developer among Amtrak’s 20,000 employees.

Your description of product A and product B actually seems to highlight what Karl Kapp calls in his contribution to this month’s carnival accidental learning. You and your colleague had to invent a way of handling the problem. What you learned in your efforts to gather is not learning that could easily have occurred outside of the situation like the one that you were in.

I’ll give some thought to an example or two from my own learning. For now, I’ll share one of my favorite quotations:

Good judgment comes from experience. Experience comes from bad judgment.

(The key here is that the bad judgment doesn’t have to be your own.)