Is tacit knowledge all that?
Peter Klein at the group blog Organizations and Markets has a thoughtful piece on seeming over-abundance of discussion of tacit knowledge. What's so great about tacit knowledge?
The knowledge management and capabilities literatures are in love — in love with tacit knowledge. Managing tacit knowledge, leveraging tacit knowledge, growing tacit knowledge — these are seen as the keys to achieving sustained competitive advantage.
He's worried that the KM cognoscenti are ignoring other types of knowledge to focus on the tacit. It's interesting to read comments from this perspective, since many KM practitioners think there is too much focus on the explicit.
The thing is that we need both the experience and intuition of the people in the field (tacit) and mechanisms to characterize and record what and how people do things (explicit).
In a follow-up post by Nicolai Foss, What's So Great About Tacit Knowledge? - Cont'd, he suggests that the whole idea of "tacit vs. explicit" is incorrect. That the question should be around how effort is required to articulate the knowledge -- that there is no such things as non-articulable knowledge.
4 Comment(s)
Hi Jack,
I'd already caught this post as well as Peter Klein's previous post that Nicolai refers to. This to me is a part of the reason that I would really rather not even refer to the term "tacit" knowledge. I think that it is too broad, to unmanageable, and perhaps provides little benefit as a label.
I often joke about someone (anyone) discussing the benefits of KM with the organizational managers...while tapping their foreheads and stating knowingly, "And you know tacit knowledge is what is in our heads. (wink wink) And it's difficult to capture. (wink wink) But it's the knowledge we need to focus on." And I also imagine that about as soon as the conference room door is closed that those managers look at each other, shrug and move on to the next agenda item.
I had thought about posting in my blog about the first article and this just might spur me on to talk about it now. :-)
Dan
said:
Thanks Dan and Dennis. I always appreciate your comments.
The idea that Dennis mentions of how Expertise Management Systems are sold is interesting. I can see how the discussion might go. Connecting seekers to those who have expertise is one of the long-sought goals of knowledge management, particularly when programmed-experts don't work a la expert systems. Expertise is more than just a pile of knowledge that can be extracted and recorded somewhere, no matter how hard you try. Expertise is the collected knowledge and experience, and it can really only be volunteered through discussion that brings to light the experience of the seeker and their context. By the way, expert systems DO WORK in situations where the setting and userbase is very well known, for example.
Jack, I like your sentence "Expertise is the collected knowledge and experience, and it can really only be volunteered through discussion that brings to light the experience of the seeker and their context." That emphasizes the iterative and interactive nature of a process which can extend far beyond connecting someone with recorded knowledge. (I also would like to get away from the term "tacit knowledge" which creates just as much eye-rolling and blank stares as the term "web 2.0" in some circles.)
I also question the demarcation between tacit and explicit. In my understanding of expertise management systems, for example, I view helping seekers connect with experts as providing access to both types of knowledge.