Think about the last time you were new — a job, a team, a client. What did you deliberately do to learn how things really worked there?

Every workplace runs on unwritten rules, and the people who adapt fastest treat learning them as active work — watching, asking, testing small things — rather than waiting for onboarding to cover it. "Deliberately" pushes past "I settled in fine" to moves an interviewer can actually score.

• What surprised you about how they worked, and how did you adjust?
• Who did you learn the unwritten rules from, and why them?
• What did you get wrong early because you didn't know yet?

Named tactics — shadowing, asking about norms, testing their understanding early — an unwritten rule they discovered and adapted to, and an early misstep owned along with what it taught them.

Settling in described as passive absorption, nothing about the place surprised them, or the adjustment ran one way — the new environment was expected to adapt to them.