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Feb. 14, 2007

In today's competitive B2B segment, one of the primary leadership challenges facing organizations is to capture knowledge and experience to produce tangible results very rapidly.

To empower such knowledge, one needs to collect it and understand it first-hand. Additionally, one needs to define it, for it's hard to take advantage of something if one doesn't know what it is in the first place.

Our main focus is most frequently on explicit knowledge -- what is clear, can be proven, is in fact "known" and incontrovertible. We are less adept at articulating or capturing tacit knowledge -- that combination of implied learning, conclusions, interpretation and institutional culture and capacity that allows us to use explicit knowledge to achieve concrete results.

Despite all of what has been said on the issue of KM (knowledge management) and related challenges, very few companies have figured out how to define and capture tacit knowledge in a useful and replicable way.

On average, extracting valuable expertise for common applications barely rises above witchcraft.

Overall, explicit knowledge is formal and systematic, easily communicated and shared with a high degree of accuracy. It can be transmitted in precise language and includes patents, instruction manuals, written procedures, best practices, lessons learned and even research findings.

With some effort, explicit knowledge can be easily codified, documented, transferred, and shared.

Since our service economy has evolved greatly, capturing explicit knowledge has played an increasingly large role. Imagine an organization without procedure manuals, employee handbooks, or training manuals. Encapsulating explicit knowledge within a large scale organization is well understood.

As a mattor of fact, many capable COTS applications enable its successful capture, categorization, and dissemination. However, we need to understand and capture tacit knowledge.

The notion of tacit knowledge was first extensively explored by Michael Polyani in his seminal book The Tacit Dimension. Polyani briefly summarizes tacit knowledge as "knowing more than you can tell" -- knowledge that is so built into your own understanding of a process that awareness of this knowledge is not apparent, nor explicable.

We believe that the most useful knowledge that one can capture is tacit knowledge. Tacit knowledge is more valuable because it provides context for people, places, ideas, and experiences. It generally requires extensive personal contact and trust to be shared effectively -- but it is the context, the glue that holds people and organizations and missions together, that makes explicit knowledge useful.

Tacit knowledge is that quality which allows experts to act, work, and make judgments without having to directly reference the declarative, explicit knowledge behind actions and decisions.

The expert works without an explicit understanding/acknowledgement/recognition as to why he or she acts in a particular way. He or she draws from enormous reservoirs of explicit knowledge and experience that combine in the moment to prompt the right decision or sequence or actions.

Simply put, tacit knowledge at high levels just happens.

Because tacit knowledge is internal, personal and derives from experience and expertise (both individual and organizational), it is almost impossible to put into a document or database. It is hard to codify.

It is in the air... Tacit knowledge is subjective, largely subconscious, difficult to articulate, embedded in direct experience and action, and usually shared through highly interactive means.

A great deal of tacit knowledge is part of an organization's culture, and shifts and is lost as employees retire or change employers. Explicit knowledge is objective, technical, rational, formalized, documented, and needs little interpretation once it is understood.

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