tacit knowledge essay

Tacit Knowledge: Definition, Examples, and Importance

In this guide, we discuss what is tacit knowledge, the benefits to businesses and how to capture and convert it into concrete, explicit knowledge.

David Oragui

Last Updated

March 12 2024

The knowledge possessed by your team members is one of your organization’s most valuable assets.

This just makes sense:

The more organizational knowledge your team has about the products and services you offer, your customers’ needs, and your industry as a whole, the more productive and successful your company will be.

Now, in many cases, the knowledge possessed by your team members is easily documented and communicated. 

This knowledge—known as explicit knowledge —can take the form of step-by-step instructions, concrete answers to frequently asked questions, records of customer interactions, and more.

Sometimes, though, the knowledge held by your employees is a bit more difficult to communicate or document.

But, it’s not impossible  to do so.

In this article, we’re going to dig deep into the concept of tacit knowledge .

Specifically, we’ll discuss:

• What is tacit knowledge
• Why capturing tacit knowledge is essential to your company’s success
• How to capture tacit knowledge and convert it into concrete, explicit knowledge

Let’s dive in.

What is Tacit Knowledge?

Tacit knowledge refers to the knowledge, skills, and abilities an individual gains through experience that is often difficult to put into words or otherwise communicate.

Tacit knowledge is sometimes known by a few alternate terms, such as:

• Experiential knowledge
• Tribal knowledge
• “Know-how” knowledge

The term “tribal knowledge” refers to the fact that tacit knowledge often spreads throughout an organization without being documented—and possibly never actively pointed out or discussed.

Similarly, “know-how” refers to the idea that, sometimes, an individual just can’t explain how they know what they know (or know how to do). 

For example, a professional golfer may be able to hit a ball 300 yards down the fairway, but may not be able to communicate a complete break down of every single thing they do when swinging a club to make it happen.

Consider a more relatable example: driving a car on the highway. Reflect on your instinctive ability to apply just the right amount of pressure to the brakes, avoiding stopping too short (risking a rear-end collision) or too late (colliding with the car in front). While a manual can teach you how to use the brakes (explicit knowledge), your ability to use them effectively stems from experience (tacit knowledge).

Additional Examples of Tacit Knowledge

A few, more pertinent examples of tacit knowledge:

• Being able to identify the exact moment a prospect is ready to hear your sales pitch
• Knowing just the right words to use within your copy to attract and engage your audience
• Knowing which specific piece of content to deliver to a customer based on their expressed needs

Examples of Explicit Knowledge

In contrast, explicit knowledge related to the above examples might be:

• The stages of your documented sales process
• Your brand’s content style guide
• Your brand’s content library and its specific content

Difference Between Tacit, Implicit, and Explicit Knowledge

Sometimes the terms " tacit knowledge " and " implicit knowledge " are used interchangeably, but they're not entirely the same.

In simple terms, implicit knowledge is a form of tacit knowledge that can potentially be made explicit with some effort or reflection . It lies between tacit and explicit knowledge and represents subconscious understanding or assumptions that individuals may not immediately be aware of.

For implicit knowledge to become explicit knowledge , it requires more than just recording the information verbatim. It involves a process of reflection and translation of the subconscious understanding into an easily communicable format.

It's crucial to note that knowledge isn't strictly classified as either explicit or tacit. Instead, we should consider each piece of knowledge possessed by an organization on a continuum, ranging from purely tacit to entirely explicit.

Take, for example, your sales team's documented process for pitching to a customer. The overall document clearly outlines the steps to take throughout the process—an example of explicit knowledge. However, within each step, there may be certain "know-how" aspects that your sales team intuitively understands but might not be obvious to others without their experience and expertise.

So there you have it! 

The key differences between tacit, implicit, and explicit knowledge come down to how easily they can be communicated and documented . While tacit knowledge is elusive and hard to articulate, implicit knowledge is subconscious but can potentially be made explicit, and explicit knowledge is straightforward to share. By understanding these distinctions, you can create an environment that nurtures learning, sparks innovation, and drives growth within your organization.

The Benefits of Capturing Your Organization’s Tacit Knowledge

Now that you understand what tacit knowledge actually is—and how difficult it is to capture—you might be left asking:

Why should my organization bother capturing our tacit knowledge and codifying it into explicit knowledge in the first place?

To be sure, there are many benefits of capturing tacit knowledge, such as...

1. Communicate Organizational Knowledge More Effectively

Earlier, we mentioned that tacit knowledge is sometimes referred to as “tribal knowledge”, as team members often “absorb” it simply by gaining more experience working within an organization.

The thing is, though:

Relying on this osmosis-like transfer of knowledge leaves up to chance whether it actually happens or not. Unfortunately, even your longest-lived employees may not gain the tacit knowledge needed to best do their jobs.

Worse yet, it may be the case that your team members don’t know what they don’t know. Basically, this means they’ll continue to use a sub-par approach to their duties simply because they aren’t aware that there’s a better way to do them.

(This especially applies to remotely-operating teams , as employees have minimal interactions with one another—meaning much fewer chances to exchange and absorb knowledge.)

That said, the main benefit of being able to transfer tacit knowledge is that it makes this information visible and accessible to all members of your team. 

It also clarifies any confusion or uncertainties your team members may have about a given process, allowing them to dig into the “nitty-gritty” details to cement their understanding for good.

The ability to capture your tacit knowledge also allows you to onboard new employees more efficiently. The typical onboarding process involves teaching newbies what the steps of various processes are. 

Injecting tacit knowledge into the mix allows them to get a feel for how to optimally perform these tasks.

Similarly, codifying your tacit knowledge adds value to your current, explicit knowledge content. For example, you might supplement a standard operating procedure document with a video in which an employee demonstrates the procedure in action.

In supercharging your current knowledge content, your team will be better equipped to tackle any and all processes they’re responsible for. This can lead to a massive spike in productivity throughout your organization.

Injecting tacit knowledge into your external knowledge base will have a similar effect on your customers. Here, your knowledge base content won’t just tell your customers what to do—but will also explain just how to do it. This will equip them to get the absolute most value they can from your products or services.

Overall, tacit knowledge becomes useful and valuable to others only when it’s shared by those who possess it. By documenting it concretely, you allow each of your team members to share their tacit knowledge with ease.

2. Differentiate Your Company from Your Competitors

As we mentioned earlier, the ability to store and share tacit will better equip your organization to serve its customers—and can also better equip ( and enable ) these customers to solve their own issues as they wish. 

With a comprehensive knowledge management system full of “know-what” and “know-how” information, both your support staff and your customers will always be able to find what they need to overcome the issue at hand.

If your customers can always get the info they’re looking for when engaging with your brand, they’ll have every reason to trust you over your competition moving forward.

What’s more, simply showcasing your tacit knowledge to your audience—even if they don’t necessarily need it at the moment—helps position your brand as a team of experts. If your competitors don’t offer similar content to showcase their value, you’ll already have a pretty hefty advantage over them.

3. Gain Knowledge Capital and Retain Organizational Knowledge

We’ve established that your organization’s tacit knowledge is a valuable asset.

And we don’t mean this symbolically, either.

Your team’s documented tacit knowledge is proof that your team knows what it’s doing, and that your company is a valuable entity.

For employee candidates, it provides insight into your organization’s vision, goals, and capabilities. This can attract high-quality candidates looking to work with a team as skilled and dedicated as they are.

For investors and other stakeholders, it’s proof that they can continue working with your business with confidence—and that doing so will pay off in dividends.

And, if your goal is to eventually sell your business, your documented tacit knowledge offers buyers proof that your company is made up of a highly-skilled and knowledgeable team of employees.

Knowledge capital is also valuable to your organization, as well. 

As we said earlier, documenting tacit and other knowledge makes employee onboarding much easier. 

The other side of this is that you’ll also retain previous employees’ knowledge once they leave your organization. 

This can help your current employees pick up the slack as you search for a replacement hire, and also enable your new employees to hit the ground running.

4. Increased Productivity & Organizational Innovation

Since you’ll have collaboratively developed and demonstrated best practices and optimal approaches to tasks, you’ll almost certainly perform at a much higher level.

Moreover, this type of knowledge sharing and knowledge transfer where individual team members can learn from each other's experiences and mistakes will allow employees to spend less time and energy on ideas that don't work. 

This open exchange of ideas and experiences allows employees to gain new perspectives and see things from different angles which can lead to breakthroughs, “aha moments,” and other outside-the-box ways of thinking.

Documenting your organization’s tacit knowledge may take some effort, but doing so is always well worth it.

That is, as long as you approach the process in a strategic manner...

How to Convert Tacit Knowledge Into Explicit Knowledge

We know what tacit knowledge actually is.

And we know why it’s important—even essential—for your team to document it.

Now, let’s talk about how to actually capture and document tacit knowledge .

Create an Environment Centered on Continuous Learning

Your first order of business will be to get your team focused on collecting and documenting tacit knowledge as a matter of course.

Audit Your Current Knowledge Content and Identify Knowledge Gaps

To get started, here, you’ll first need to audit your current knowledge content—both related to tacit knowledge and overall. As a team, comb through your knowledge content, assessing each piece for:

• Comprehensiveness : Does the content cover every aspect of the topic? Is anything left unsaid or unexplained? Do words fall short of truly showcasing the knowledge in question?
• Digestibility : Is it easy to read or otherwise consume the knowledge content? Is there a more effective and efficient way you could communicate the information in question?
• Applicability : Does your knowledge content allow the user to take action? Will taking said action lead them to the outcome they expect? Do they need anything else to move forward productively?

You also want to think of any knowledge-related questions, comments, or feedback you’ve received from your team or your audience. Similarly, you can look at your team’s and individual employees’ performances to see where improvements need to be made.

The goal here is to identify two key things:

• Knowledge and skill gaps within your organization that could be filled by documenting tacit knowledge
• Gaps within your knowledge base, again to be filled with documentation of tacit knowledge

Build Intentional Learning Into Your Processes

Because of its intangible nature, it’s easy to overlook or take for granted the tacit knowledge flowing through your organization at all times.

So, it’s vital that your team becomes more intentional in their efforts to identify and capture any sort of learning that takes place throughout a given process.

The key to building this intentionality: Create opportunities for your team to share their knowledge, expertise, and experiences with one another.

Employee training methods like mentorships or shadowing allow veteran employees to not just share information with new employees, but also actively train them to adhere to best practices for certain processes.

Here’s how a guided experience works:

• The new employee observes or shadows an experienced employee as they go through a given process
• The new employee then goes through the process, with the expert providing guidance and feedback along the way
• Once they’ve completed the task, the pair will discuss any challenges, problems, or other issues that may have come about
• The newbie then assumes the role of the expert, providing guidance to the expert (playing the role of an inexperienced employee learning from the newbie’s directions)
• The expert will gauge the new employee’s understanding of the process—tacit knowledge and all—and will discuss their assessment with their partner

You might also create knowledge cafe sessions, which are aimed at facilitating team-wide discussions on specific topics.

Here, the process is as follows:

• After breaking into small groups, your team members will begin exploring the many facets of the topic at hand. During this time, they can write, draw, list, brainstorm, or do anything else that’s conducive to the creation and spread of tacit knowledge.
• After a period of time, certain members of the group will rotate out, while others will stay put. Once new groups have been formed, those that stayed will review the previous discussion, then new members will discuss theirs. This process can be repeated until everyone has rotated to all groups.
• The group as a whole will come back together for a “town hall”-like meeting. This wrap-up discussion will be about reflecting on new knowledge, insights, and other such information, as well as any breakthroughs that may have occurred throughout the session.

Finally, you’ll want to focus on documenting tacit knowledge whenever discussing lessons learned with your team. 

This means thinking more abstractly about the intangibles and “know-how” exhibited by your team that led to a positive (or not-so-positive) outcome. 

From a-ha moments to on-the-fly changes to your procedures, there will likely be a number of things worth discussing that otherwise typically go overlooked.

Before moving on, note that, to create an environment focused on continuous learning, you may need to realign your employees with your company’s overall vision. 

Without taking this critical step, it will be difficult for your team to even recognize tacit knowledge in the first place—let alone effectively document it.

Inject Storytelling Into Your Knowledge Management System

Now that you’ve identified, fleshed out, and solidified your team’s tacit knowledge, you’ll need to find a way to codify it so that it more easily be documented.

This is where knowledge management (KM) comes in. 

Knowledge management tries to find ways to visualize tacit knowledge and convert it into explicit knowledge to better enable knowledge sharing and knowledge transfer with other individuals within a group. 

The key to doing this:

Storytelling.

As opposed to explicit knowledge (which can be communicated in concrete terms, such as a step-by-step list), tacit knowledge is best understood through experience. 

In lieu of actually providing an experience to your learner, the next best thing is allowing them to experience it vicariously through your team members.

The idea here is for your audience to be able to see themselves doing the things being discussed within the content. 

It allows your team to convert their experiential learning into immersive content to be experienced by others. 

More than just reading the steps of how to troubleshoot an issue, you want them to actually picture themselves fixing it in real life.

Storytelling content centers around the actions, thoughts, and ideas a veteran employee exhibits as they go through a certain process. 

Again, in addition to explaining how to go about the process, the content will dig into any insights or a-ha moments uncovered along the way.

Often, storytelling content takes the form of an interview but is a bit more open-ended. On one end, the interviewer/content-creator will loosely guide the conversation in order to weave a powerful story. 

On the other, the interviewee/expert will have plenty of opportunities to dig into the intangible aspects of the process that can’t be documented otherwise.

Because of this “intangible-ness”, the most effective way to deliver storytelling content is through video. That way, your user gets visual, audio, and textual content surrounding a given topic—all meant to create the immersive experience we mentioned above.

Once you’ve created this content, you can then add it to your current—and more explicit—content within your knowledge management system . 

By providing both explicit and tacit knowledge to your knowledge management system, you add even more value to an already invaluable resource.

Tacit Knowledge: The Key to Organizational Excellence

Tacit knowledge plays an indispensable role in the success and growth of any organization. This often intangible and experiential form of knowledge, gained through years of practice and experience, complements explicit knowledge by providing the critical "know-how" and insights that enable individuals and teams to excel in their roles.

Understanding and valuing the importance of tacit knowledge allows organizations to harness the collective wisdom of their team members, fostering a culture of continuous learning, innovation, and adaptation. By creating opportunities for knowledge sharing, collaboration, and mentorship, organizations can effectively tap into their employees' tacit knowledge, bridging gaps and empowering everyone to grow together.

In a rapidly evolving business landscape, recognizing and leveraging tacit knowledge not only sets organizations apart but also contributes to their long-term success and competitiveness. By embracing the power of tacit knowledge, you will unlock the true potential of your organization, harnessing the collective experience and expertise of your team members to drive excellence and growth.

As part of the process of harnessing of managing and enabling employees to use tacit knowledge effectively, a knowledge base becomes an essential tool. By creating a well-structured knowledge base, you provide your employees a central repository where tacit knowledge—transformed into accessible, explicit content—can be stored, shared, and continuously updated. This ensures that invaluable insights and the nuanced understanding of experienced team members are not lost but are instead preserved for ongoing and future reference.

Our knowledge base software is a user-friendly platform to aid with this critical aspect of ensuring that tacit knowledge is both preserved and shared effectively. With our software, you can easily create, manage, and optimize your knowledge base so that it's tailored to your unique needs. The best part is that we're offering a free 14-day trial so that you can experience firsthand just how our software streamlines the integration of tacit knowledge into your daily operations.

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15 Tacit Knowledge Examples

Dave Cornell (PhD)

Dr. Cornell has worked in education for more than 20 years. His work has involved designing teacher certification for Trinity College in London and in-service training for state governments in the United States. He has trained kindergarten teachers in 8 countries and helped businessmen and women open baby centers and kindergartens in 3 countries.

Learn about our Editorial Process

Chris Drew (PhD)

This article was peer-reviewed and edited by Chris Drew (PhD). The review process on Helpful Professor involves having a PhD level expert fact check, edit, and contribute to articles. Reviewers ensure all content reflects expert academic consensus and is backed up with reference to academic studies. Dr. Drew has published over 20 academic articles in scholarly journals. He is the former editor of the Journal of Learning Development in Higher Education and holds a PhD in Education from ACU.

Tacit knowledge refers to things we know as a result of our personal experience. It is developed over time based on directly experiencing situations and crystalizing what is learned into a broader understanding.

It is the knowledge experts have learned over time without actually being taught or even thinking too hard about it.

Examples of tacit knowledge can be seen whenever we ask a skilled professional why they did something and the professional answers:

“I didn’t think about how, when, or why I did it, but I know it was the right thing to do.”

Simply put, their experience drives their actions, but they may not be able to describe their actions to a novice.

Tacit Knowledge Definition

The term tacit knowledge is attributed to Polanyi (1962; 1966) who stated:

“I shall reconsider human knowledge by starting from the fact that we can know more than we can tell” (1966, p. 4).

Since then, scholars have had great difficulty in developing an operational definition that would lend itself to scientific study.

Ambrosini and Bowman (2001) identify this problem as a substantial impediment:

“…there is little empirical research to support this theoretical proposition. Tacit knowledge has so far resisted operationalization ” (p. 811).

An often-cited definition is:

“Knowledge that is “imperfectly accessible to conscious thought” [Nelson and Winter, 1982, p. 79] yet will show its presence in the success of our performance using that knowledge.” (Herfel, Gao & Rodrigues, 2011)

This is in contrast to explicit knowledge, which is easily defined, structured, written and documented. While explicit knowledge is easily transferred from individual to individual, tacit knowledge is not.

Although tacit knowledge contains both declarative and procedural knowledge , it also encompasses far less tangible concepts such as wisdom , insight, and intuition .

Tacit Knowledge Examples

• Learning your Native Language: As a child grows, they acquire their native language through experience, long before formally studying the rules of grammar and syntax.  
• In-game coaching: Some basketball coaches have an intuitive feel for the game and instinctively adjust their play-calling and lineup based on in-game developments.
• Remembering Faces: Some people have an excellent memory for faces. This ability seems to come naturally to them, but they cannot explain how they accomplish this feat. 
• Social Skills: Aspects of emotional intelligence seem very intuitive, such as the ability to know exactly what to say in almost any social situation.
• Art Appreciation: Aesthetic appreciation is a highly subjective perception of art or design features that distinguish exceptional work from more common forms. It is an acquired sense of taste that escapes the common humans.
• Leadership: The strategic planning of a large corporation is a very nuanced skill that is rare to find. That’s one reason those that possess this form of tacit knowledge are well-compensated.  
• Musical Geniuses: Being able to create musical compositions that are so compelling that they touch the heart and souls of millions of people. Those that have this ability usually can’t explain how it happens…it just does.
• Riding a Bike: Learning how to ride a bike cannot be mastered by reading a book. The ability is developed through repetitive experiences.
• Reading Body Language: Interpreting a person’s body language to discern how they are feeling and what they are thinking.
• Skilled Teachers: A skilled elementary school teacher walks into a classroom of rowdy students to assist a beginner teacher who can’t control the class. Shortly after the skilled teacher walks in, they manage get the children into line. Unfortunately, they can’t explain to the beginning teacher exactly how they knew what to do in the moment. They just did it.
• Skilled Parents: A man holding his new crying baby doesn’t know how to calm her down. He passes her to his mother – the child’s grandmother – who has raised many children. She holds the baby just the right way and makes just the right tones to calm the baby. She can’t explain how she did it.
• Master Chefs: A good chef might taste the meal they’re preparing and know tacitly exactly what to add and what changes to make to ensure the meal will be a success. They work by feel rather than strict explicit theory.
• Aging Sportspeople: As sportspeople age, they lose physical prowess, but they can continue as elite sportspeople for a few years yet because their tacit knowledge makes them that little bit faster and more intuitive than their younger peers.
• Essay Writing: When grading an essay, a teacher will often see a poorly-written paragraph and know there’s something missing but not be able to explain what, so they frustratingly write: “needs more depth.” Knowing a well-written essay and how to write well is often reliant on your tacit knowledge of grammar, spelling, and argument structure.
• Practice vs Theory: An arrogant med school graduate starts their new job at a hospital. They walk into the ward and are working slowly, trying to use the theory they’ve learned. Meanwhile, the 20-year experienced nurse runs around doing the work 20 times faster because they know what to do from experience, not from books.

Tacit Knowledge Framework

Murphy et al. (2004) have formulated a conceptual framework for understanding tacit knowledge and its role in organizations. This framework consists of several essential domains.

The domains are:

• Implicitness: Knowledge that is learned and transferred through experience.
• Experiential: “Know-how” which informs as to the best course of action; it is only attained through experience.
• Interactive-ness: Knowledge that is developed through interactions between coworkers.
• Show-how: Allows tacit knowledge to be transferred through demonstration, modeling, and observed practice.
• Non-measurability: Tacit knowledge is uncodifiable; it cannot be observed or measured.
• Personal: It is person-embodied, subjective, and intuitive.

The authors suggest that their conceptual framework “…makes it appropriate as a tool in the development of corporate knowledge management strategies for the twenty-first century” (p. 6).

Case Studies and Research Basis

1. tacit knowledge and the master chefs.

Becoming a master chef is not easy. It requires years of experience, and failure. Although Gordan Ramsay and Jamie Oliver make it look easy enough, it surely is not.

Millions of viewers watch these masters of culinary delights whip-up fantastic meals in less than 30 minutes.

But, when tried at home, with the exact same ingredients, and pausing the YouTube video countless times, the likelihood of replicating what is presented on screen is near impossible.

This is because cooking is an art form that is developed over years, even decades.

It involves an intuitive sense of timing; an acute sense of smell that informs that timing; and a keen eye for subtle changes in texture as food transforms to an optimal state.

The skills of a master chef are the embodiment of tacit knowledge.

2. How to Share Tacit Knowledge  

As organizations evolve, one of the biggest obstacles they face is how to transfer the experience of senior employees to newer employees. Here, the term “experience” is really referring to tacit knowledge.

The problem however, is that by its very definition, tacit knowledge is uncodifiable. It defies transfer. So, what is a company to do?

Dr. Nancy Dixon explains that the first step to knowing how to share tacit knowledge is to understand how it is stored in memory.

Instead of being stored like semantic knowledge, which is located in a specific location in the memory network, Dr. Dixon states that tacit knowledge “is stored as bits and pieces.”

So, when faced with a workplace challenge, “we construct that knowledge from the bits and pieces that we put together over many years of experience.”

The experienced professional with an abundance of tacit knowledge will almost never be able to provide a straight answer. Instead, they will ask a variety of questions to build context. Understanding context will allow the construction of an answer that comes from their tacit knowledge.

Understanding how tacit knowledge is constructed is key to understanding how it can be shared.

3. Company X: What to do with the Old-Timers  

This is a narrative account of a study on the social impact of technological advancements. It took place in an electrical engineering firm in the Republic of Ireland.

Company X operates facilities that utilize some of the most advanced automated systems in the world. One day, the company introduced a new computer-aided design tool.  

Unfortunately, this created an issue with older engineers, some of which had worked with the company since it opened. And one who had never used a PC.

“Consequently, there was a very large body of tacit knowledge within the group” (Murphy et al., 2004, p. 3).

The company’s stance: retirement was necessary as technology advances, “otherwise labor costs will increase forever.”

However, the manager “recognized that forty years of engineering knowledge would be lost to the firm.”

Therefore, the manager offered:

• Subsidized home PC purchases
• Implemented computerized and non-computerized working options
• Created a new Senior Engineer title

The plan worked. “The organisation was able to utilise a new technology project to ensure that important tacit knowledge was diffused in the firm” (p. 4).

Losing experienced professionals can create a huge loss of tacit knowledge that cannot be replaced. This can cause a company to lose its competitive edge, which can be fatal in a globalized industry.

4. The Story Of Q

Sharing information among scientists can be a bit tricky. On the one hand, scientists are supposed to share insights for the advancement of knowledge. On the other hand, scientists are people, and sometimes people want to keep their knowledge a secret.

And on another hand (yes, that’s three hands), sometimes scientists are willing to share with colleagues, but because tacit knowledge is so nuanced, they can’t exactly explain what they know.

As Polanyi said, “we can know more than we can tell.”

This paradox is illustrated in a story about a Russian scientist and his Western colleagues.

For about 20 years, the Russian had reported advancements with the Q of sapphire, which refers to some technical parameters needed in research with lasers.

As the story goes, he shared his knowledge with colleagues in Glasgow, but they were unable to replicate his findings for years.

As time went on, they became suspicious.

It was not until the Russian scientist worked extensively with the Glasgow team directly that the results were replicated.

As reported by Collins (2001), the Glasgow team learned about numerous techniques used by their Russian counterpart. None of this knowledge was not documented in the research literature.

The transfer of this tacit knowledge could have only occurred by working side-by-side.

5. Ghost in the Machine

When it comes to high-technology, there may be no better example than NASA. Sending satellites and astronauts into space requires some of the most advanced technology systems on the planet.

Even though technology can progress at an incredibly rapid rate, nothing beats experience. Or, should we say, nothing beats tacit knowledge.

This is illustrated by NASA scientist Pat Simpkins , Director of Engineering at the Kennedy Space Center.

He provides an example of how important tacit knowledge is by telling a story about a cabin-leak check. In order to perform the check, one particular valve had to be open, which was stated in the manual.

However, experience had taught the older engineers that the valve had to be turned to a certain setting.

“Well, that was never written anywhere that that’s how you perform the cabin-leak check. It’s just that the technicians and the engineers who worked that system, knew that’s what you had to do.”

This is an example of how tacit knowledge, formed as a result of experience, is often not documented.

Near the end of the video, Director Simpkins refers to this predicament as the “ghost in the machine” which adds to the risk of each mission.

Tacit vs Implicit Knowledge

Tacit knowledge is similar to implicit knowledge. Both are simply known without having to be expressed to anyone. These are both types of knowledge that you don’t need to think about – you just have them and can apply them in a perfect flow state. But unlike implicit knowledge, tacit knowledge is unexplainable, or at least, hard for the person with the knowledge to be able to put into words and justify. In other words, tacit knowledge is hard to communicate, while implicit knowledge can be communicated if required, but generally isn’t because it’s assumed everyone in the room knows it and has it.

Tacit knowledge is knowledge that comes from experience. It is usually not documented, not easily explained by those that possess it, and not easily transferrable to others.

This can present a real dilemma for companies. As technology changes and older personnel lag behind, the organization must find a way to retain the tacit knowledge of experienced staff without busting the payroll.

Tacit knowledge is also needed in professions outside of high-tech. For example, becoming a master chef can take decades of experience.

Part of the difficulty of transferring tacit knowledge to others is that it is not stored in a single location like semantic knowledge. The information is scattered about throughout one’s mind.

So, when asked a question that requires tacit knowledge to be answered, it is usually met with other questions to better ascertain context from which the answer is dependent.

Despite all the difficulties, tacit knowledge is considered by some to be far more valuable than explicit knowledge, which can often be acquired after a few hours of reading.

Ambrosini, V., & Bowman, C. (2001). Tacit knowledge: Some suggestions for operationalization. Journal of Management Studies, 38(6), 811-829. doi: https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-6486.00260

Collins, H. M. (February 2001). “Tacit Knowledge, Trust and the Q of Sapphire” . Social Studies of Science, 31(1): 71–85.

Herfel, W. E., Yin Gao, and D. J. Rodrigues . (2011). Chinese medicine and complex systems dynamics. In Gabbay, D., Thagard, P., Woods, J., & Hooker, C. (eds.).  Philosophy of complex systems  (Vol. 10). London: Elsevier.

Murphy, F., Stapleton, L. & Smith, D. (2004). Tacit knowledge and human centred systems: The key to managing the social impact of technology. International Multitrack Conference of Advances in Control Systems , University of Vienna (TUWien).

Polanyi, M. (1962). Personal knowledge, towards a post critical philosophy . London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.

Polanyi, M. (1966). The tacit dimension. New York: Doubleday & Co.

Puusa, A., & Eerikäinen, M. (2010). Is tacit knowledge really tacit? Electronic Journal of Knowledge Management, 8 (3), pp307-318.

Venkitachalam, K., & Busch, P. (2012). Tacit knowledge: Review and possible research directions. Journal of Knowledge Management . doi: https://doi.org/10.1108/13673271211218915

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Tacit knowing: what it is and why it matters.

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 October 2021

Tacit knowing as a concept and legitimate topic of scholarship came up in philosophical research in the second half of the 20th century in the form of some influential works by Michael Polanyi (although similar concepts had been discussed before). Systematic epistemological studies on the topic are still scarce, however. In this article, I support the thesis that tacit knowing pervades all our common major divisions of knowledge and that it therefore must not be neglected in epistemological research. By this approach I am simultaneously giving a systematic back-up for Polanyi's claim that the tacit component is found in all knowledge.

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• Volume 20, Issue 2
• Abida Malik (a1)
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/epi.2021.41

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• DOI: 10.1037/0096-3445.118.3.219
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Implicit learning and tacit knowledge

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Implicit learning and tacit knowledge: An essay on the cognitive unconscious

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Tacit Knowledge: How Can We Capture It?

• Conference paper
• First Online: 04 October 2018
• Cite this conference paper

• Jacqueline Jepson   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-7588-7035 3 ,
• Konstantinos Kirytopoulos   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0001-7675-6785 3 &
• Nicholas Chileshe   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-1981-7518 3  

6012 Accesses

2 Citations

The importance of knowledge transfer or mentoring as a way to pass tacit knowledge (experience) across generations is discussed widely. Within project management this tends to rely on proximity and mutual exchange. The sender/receiver approaches used to transfer learning from one project to another is inhibited by the context of the projects, and the lack of time, which may obscure its relevance or purpose. There is concern that the knowledge captured in the minds of senior project managers is not being passed on to the next generation. Conversely it may be that much of the knowledge senior project managers have is obsolete or has been superseded by new methods and systems. This study used a grounded theory approach when interviewing 25 construction project managers from Australia on the management of project risk. Experience accumulated over time was considered by almost all interviewees to be the most important way of accumulating knowledge. Methods such as lessons learnt and close off reports are poorly used; most tacit knowledge is transferred through mentoring with very limited use of technology in this process. Changing construction technology did not concern the PMs as they perceived their job as managing processes and their role being flexible enough to adapt to change. From an industry perspective this lack of concern with the sharing of tacit knowledge and the lack of effective systems to capture it is going to be detrimental for its future. Project managers tended to still rely on traditional and the often poorly utilized methods such as lessons learnt and mentoring to capture this knowledge. Using this information, the study examines the key issues around knowledge management in project organizations and possible avenues for capturing tacit knowledge. Tacit knowledge will potentially be lost unless better systems are developed. This paper questions how Building Information Modelling, IT systems and the more visually based techniques such as pod casting, 3D photography, time-lapse cameras, web-based methods can to be used to accumulate and enable more effective knowledge transfer. The conclusion derived is that experience accumulated to generate tacit knowledge is essential for the successful management of future projects.

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Jepson, J., Kirytopoulos, K., Chileshe, N. (2019). Tacit Knowledge: How Can We Capture It?. In: Mutis, I., Hartmann, T. (eds) Advances in Informatics and Computing in Civil and Construction Engineering. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-00220-6_23

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1. Introductory remarks

• Published: September 1996
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This introductory chapter provides an overall introduction to the issue of unconscious cognitive functions. It reviews the literature on a host of topics that are intimately related to the core issue including a short history of work on learning, a discussion of nativism and its relations to empiricism, an overview of the notion of consciousness, how to study it and its mental contents, and the links between these topics and basic principles of evolutionary biology.

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Implicit Learning and Tacit Knowledge: An Essay on the Cognitive Unconscious (Oxford Psychology #19)

Description.

In this new volume in the Oxford Psychology Series, the author presents a highly readable account of the cognitive unconscious, focusing in particular on the problem of implicit learning. Implicit learning is defined as the acquisition of knowledge that takes place independently of the conscious attempts to learn and largely in the absence of explicit knowledge about what was acquired. One of the core assumptions of this argument is that implicit learning is a fundamental, "root" process, one that lies at the very heart of the adaptive behavioral repertoire of every complex organism. The author's goals are to outline the essential features of implicit learning that have emerged from the many studies that have been carried out in a variety of experimental laboratories over the past several decades; to present the various alternative perspectives on this issue that have been proposed by other researchers and to try to accommodate these views with his own; to structure the literature so that it can be seen in the context of standard heuristics of evolutionary biology; to present the material within a functionalist approach and to try to show why the experimental data should be seen as entailing particular epistemological perspectives; and to present implicit processing as encompassing a general and ubiquitous set of operations that have wide currency and several possible applications. Chapter 1 begins with the core problem under consideration in this book, a characterization of "implicit learning" as it has come to be used in the literature. Reber puts this seemingly specialized topic into a general framework and suggests a theoretical model based on standard heuristics of evolutionary biology. In his account, Reber weaves a capsule history of interest in and work on the cognitive unconscious. Chapter 2 turns to a detailed overview of the experimental work on the acquisition of implicit knowledge, which currently is of great interest. Chapter 3 develops the evolutionary model within which one can see learning and cognition as richly intertwining issues and not as two distinct fields with one dominating the other. Finally, Chapter 4 explores a variety of entailments and speculations concerning implicit cognitive processes and their general role in the larger scope of human performance.

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Memory, Imprinting and the Brain: An Inquiry Into Mechanisms (Oxford Psychology #10)

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Looking Down on Human Intelligence: From Psychometrics to the Brain (Oxford Psychology #34)

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Response Times: Their Role in Inferring Elementary Mental Organization (Oxford Psychology #8)

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the encyclopaedia of pedagogy and informal education

Michael Polanyi and tacit knowledge

Michael polanyi and tacit knowledge. michael polanyi helped to deepen our appreciation of the contribution of ‘tacit knowing’ to the generation of new understandings and social and scientific discovery. we briefly explore his relevance to educators..

C ontents : introduction · tacit knowledge · conclusion · bibliography · how to cite this article

Michael Polanyi (1891-1976) made a profound contribution both to the philosophy of science and social science. Born in Budapest into a upper class Jewish family, he studied at the University there (gaining doctoral degrees both in medicine and physical science) and at Karlsruhe. His initial work was as a physical chemist – undertaking significant work at the University of Berlin (and other universities) on crystal structure and reaction kinetics. With the rise to power in Germany of Hitler, Michael Polanyi emigrated to Britain and became Professor of Physical Chemistry at the University of Manchester (1933-1948). In a significant shift, following his growing contribution to the literature of social science and philosophy, Michael Polanyi then became Professor of Social Sciences at Manchester (1948-58). He also lectured as visiting professor or senior fellow at the universities of Chicago, Aberdeen, Virginia, Stanford and Merton College, Oxford.

Tacit knowledge

Central to Michael Polanyi’s thinking was the belief that creative acts (especially acts of discovery) are shot-through or charged with strong personal feelings and commitments (hence the title of his most famous work Personal Knowledge ). Arguing against the then dominant position that science was somehow value-free, Michael Polanyi sought to bring into creative tension a concern with reasoned and critical interrogation with other, more ‘tacit’, forms of knowing.

Polanyi’s argument was that the informed guesses, hunches and imaginings that are part of exploratory acts are motivated by what he describes as ‘passions’. They might well be aimed at discovering ‘truth’, but they are not necessarily in a form that can be stated in propositional or formal terms. As Michael Polanyi (1967: 4) wrote in The Tacit Dimension, we should start from the fact that ‘we can know more than we can tell ‘. He termed this pre-logical phase of knowing as ‘tacit knowledge’. Tacit knowledge comprises a range of conceptual and sensory information and images that can be brought to bear in an attempt to make sense of something (see Hodgkin 1991). Many bits of tacit knowledge can be brought together to help form a new model or theory. This inevitably led him to explore connoisseurship and the process of discovery (rather than with the validation or refutation of theories and models – in contrast with Popper, for example).

We must conclude that the paradigmatic case of scientific knowledge, in which all faculties that are necessary for finding and holding scientific knowledge are fully developed, is the knowledge of approaching discovery. To hold such knowledge is an act deeply committed to the conviction that there is something there to be discovered. It is personal, in the sense of involving the personality of him who holds it, and also in the sense of being, as a rule, solitary; but there is no trace in it of self-indulgence. The discoverer is filled with a compelling sense of responsibility for the pursuit of a hidden truth, which demands his services for revealing it. His act of knowing exercises a personal judgement in relating evidence to an external reality, an aspect of which he is seeking to apprehend. (Polanyi 1967: 24-5)

Michael Polanyi placed a strong emphasis on dialogue within an open community (a theme taken up later strongly by the physicist David Bohm ). He recognized the strength by which we hold opinions and understandings and our resistance to changing them. Unlike many of his contemporaries he placed his thinking within an appreciation of God and of the power of worship – especially in his later writing (see, for example, Meaning ). In his earlier work (especially in Personal Knowledge ) Polanyi seems to be preoccupied with ‘setting forth ways to think about religious meaning as an articulate system or framework related to other articulate systems’ (Mullins undated). Later Michael Polanyi attempted to extend his model to describe the nature of human knowledge found in art, myth and religion.

In respect of the philosophy of science, it can be argued that Michael Polanyi helped to pave the way for Thomas Kuhn’s groundbreaking work on the structure of scientific revolutions. Perhaps the strongest echo of his work that we encounter as educators comes through the work of Donald Schön and Chris Argyris on knowing in action, and in Eisner’s consistent arguments for connoisseurship and criticism in evaluation. It also has parallels in Jerome Bruner’s (1960) distinction between mediated and immediate cognition or apprehension.

By paying attention to Polanyi’s conception of the tacit dimension we can begin to make sense of the place of intuition and hunches in informal education practice – and how we can come a better understanding of what might be going on in different situations. Significantly, his attention to passions and commitments throws fresh light on the praxis (informed, committed actions) that stand at the heart of informal education.

Further reading and bibliography

Mullins, P. (undated) ‘Michael Polanyi 1891-1976’, deepsite.org , http://www.deepsight.org/articles/polanyi.htm . Visited October 2, 2003. Useful introductory overview of Polanyi’s contribution with special reference to religious thought.

Polanyi, Michael (1958, 1998 ) Personal Knowledge. Towards a Post Critical Philosophy . London: Routledge. 428 pages. The classic statement tacit knowledge.

Polanyi, Michael (1967) The Tacit Dimension , New York: Anchor Books. (108 + xi pages). Based on the 1962 Terry lectures (Yale) this book provides an overview of tacit knowledge. He looks at tacit knowing, emergence and the significance of a society of explorers.

Polanyi, Michael (1997) Science, Economics and Philosophy: Selected Papers of Michael Polanyi . Edited with an introduction by R.T. Allen. New Brunswick (USA) and London: Transaction Publishers. Essays from 1917 to 1972 that includes an annotated bibliography of Michael Polanyi’s publications on society, economics, and philosophy and summaries of unpublished papers.

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Implicit Learning and Tacit Knowledge: An Essay on the Cognitive Unconscious (Oxford Psychology Series) First Edition

• ISBN-10 019510658X
• ISBN-13 978-0195106589
• Edition First Edition
• Publisher Oxford University Press
• Publication date September 5, 1996
• Part of series Oxford Psychology
• Language English
• Dimensions 9.23 x 0.47 x 6.18 inches
• Print length 200 pages
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• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Oxford University Press; First Edition (September 5, 1996)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Paperback ‏ : ‎ 200 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 019510658X
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0195106589
• Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 9.6 ounces
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 9.23 x 0.47 x 6.18 inches
• #490 in Popular Experimental Psychology
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This is part of the Expertise Acceleration topic cluster.

The Tacit Knowledge Series

Table of Contents

Tacit knowledge is ‘knowledge that cannot be captured through words alone’.

This series explores how expertise is tacit, why the research around extracting tacit knowledge is more important than the literature on deliberate practice, and how to go about acquiring tacit knowledge in the pursuit of skill acquisition.

Also related: my summary of K. Anders Ericsson's Peak, and The Problems With Deliberate Practice .

• Why Tacit Knowledge is More Important Than Deliberate Practice — In which we talk about the existence of tacit knowledge, how it relates to expertise, and why the research around tacit knowledge extraction is more interesting and more underrated than the deliberate practice literature.
• Copying Better: How To Acquire The Tacit Knowledge of Experts — The sort of tacit knowledge I am interested in is that of ‘expert intuition’. Because this is our goal, we should focus our attention on domains that are most focused on studying it. This post walks through the Recognition-Primed Decision Making model (RPD) from the field of Naturalistic Decision Making. The models helps us understand why expertise is tacit, and gives us levers to extract tacit knowledge from the heads of practitioners.
• The Three Kinds of Tacit Knowledge — It turns out there are three kinds of tacit knowledge, all of which are ‘things that cannot be captured through words alone’. This post is about definitions, and it is a summary of Harry Collins's Explicit and Tacit Knowledge — the best book I've read on the topic.
• How to Use YouTube to Learn Tacit Knowledge — We can't really talk about tacit knowledge today without talking about YouTube. We take a look at using YouTube to learn Judo, computer programming, and music, before generalising several principles from all three domains.
• An Easier Method for Extracting Tacit Knowledge — We discuss Laura Militello and Robert Hutton's Applied Cognitive Task Analysis (ACTA), a simplified method for extracting the tacit expertise of others.
• The Tricky Thing About Creating Training Programs — We take a look at how you might turn extracted, tacit expertise into a training program for yourself or others.
• An Extracted Tacit Mental Model of Business Expertise — We take a look at the work of Lia DiBello, an NDM researcher who specialises in the tacit mental model of business expertise. As it turns out, great business practitioners all share the same common mental model of business. We take a look at what that is.
• Tacit Expertise Extraction, Software Engineering Edition — An interview with Stephen Zerfas, who used the Recognition-Primed Decision Making model to accelerate his software engineering skills at Lyft.

Related Pieces

• John Cutler's Product Org Expertise — An example of using ACTA to extract intuitive, tacit expertise.
• Accelerated Expertise — A summary of the best book on NDM training methods currently available.

Continue Reading: 👓 Commoncog’s Best Series

• The Business Expertise Series — All the best businesspeople share a common mental model of business. This is what we know of that model, and why it works.
• Becoming Data Driven in Business — The data literacy course you never had.
• A Framework for Putting Mental Models to Practice — Mental model thinking is typically a fad. Here’s how to actually put Munger’s observations to practice.

Originally published 23 June 2020 , last updated 21 February 2024 .

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Implicit learning and tacit knowledge an essay on the cognitive unconscious

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