Almost none of us were born or were socialized with these tools. For me, you can be consensually non-monogamous and not doing the work to learn the widely accepted parameters of a new relationship style, but it's not really polyamory or perhaps not even ethical non-monogamy in my mind if you aren't at least attempting to learn these other elements. Otherwise, you're just kind of doing monogamy with more people -which is what I see a lot of people trying to do, and why I think they mostly fail at functional, healthy non-monogamy - because the relationship styles are fundamentally different.