Tacit Knowledge Examples: How to Capture Tacit Knowledge

Tacit knowledge is a sense of intuitive know-how, an ability to go through the motions of a task without relying on explicit knowledge (stated information) or explicit instructions. In some senses, it’s a more technical way of saying “wisdom” or “street smarts.”

People acquire tacit knowledge through the internalization of key concepts, sometimes purposefully and sometimes merely by happenstance. One of the hallmarks of tacit knowledge is how difficult it can be to express its importance in step-by-step instructions or handbooks. The explicit knowledge these sorts of sources codify can give you all the steps necessary to execute on a goal, but you still need tacit knowledge to complete them in an organic way.

The idea of tacit knowledge derives from the philosophy of Michael Polanyi, who arrived at the concept via his study of evolutionary theory. He observed animals and saw they possessed plenty of tacit knowledge (the ability to get things done intuitively). Still, they lacked the capability to explicitly codify that knowledge through language in the way humans are capable of doing.

Polanyi observed that even though human beings have the technical ability to express this sort of knowledge more explicitly, they still often lack the practical awareness to do so. The business theorists Ikujiro Nonaka and Hirotaka Takeuchi further extrapolated on these ideas, focusing on organizational knowledge creation specifically for companies and charting out a process by which explicit knowledge becomes tacit knowledge.

Tacit knowledge stands to improve your career or company on a host of different planes. These pluses help illustrate the importance of tacit knowledge:

• Greater wisdom: Different types of knowledge come from different sources—and tacit knowledge comes mostly through personal experience. In organizational knowledge management, this sort of wisdom is essential to your company’s success. While you can provide every new employee with a handbook of step-by-step rules, a wise and helpful upper management staff will prove to be just as essential to guiding new hires. On an individual level, this sort of wisdom helps you excel in applying your large reservoir of both tacit knowledge and institutional knowledge to various thorny situations.
• Improved communication: The greater the tacit knowledge base within an organization, the higher likelihood for greater problem-solving, communication, and decision-making among all team members. Ironically, facilitating this form of knowledge sharing takes some tacit knowledge of its own. It requires patience to initiate new people into intuitive practices, but it pays off exponentially in the long run.
• Increased competitiveness: If you possess a large amount of tacit knowledge, it gives you a competitive advantage. The more rapidly you acquire new knowledge and the more effectively you use old knowledge wisely, the greater the possibility you will be able to perform tasks more efficiently than your competition. Rather than merely following a formulaic approach, you’ll be able to apply your knowledge in a way that makes you stand out.

It’s easier to demonstrate tacit knowledge in action than to describe it in theory. Here are three examples of tacit knowledge in the real world:

1. 1. Closing a deal: You can read through a litany of different resources about how to best close deals, but knowing the exact time and approach necessary to sell to each individual customer requires tacit knowledge. Through working in sales over a long period, people develop an intuition about their customers and what makes them tick. While this might be difficult to measure in more quantifiable metrics, it can translate into a very quantifiable success rate.
2. 2. Marketing a product: Leveraging one marketing approach over another means intuitively knowing when one will perform better than its alternatives. This means relying on both explicit knowledge about marketing itself and your specific audience but also drawing on your past experience and current intuition about what the best approach will be.
3. 3. Speaking a language: While it takes plenty of explicit knowledge to learn a language, much of the process still seems to happen as if by magic. Through socialization, practice, and study, things like vocabulary and grammar become second nature. This is partially due to the amount of tacit knowledge you acquire through these roundabout means.

To reap the greatest benefits from this kind of knowledge, you’ll need patience, curiosity, and willing teachers. Keep these tips in mind as you attempt to acquire more tacit knowledge:

• Break down processes. Look at your own personal knowledge gaps when it comes to a task. Go over what could’ve helped you perform better in real time. Ask other relevant stakeholders for their advice on what will help you become more efficient. Look at previous codification about how to perform a process, then ask your team members about their more personalized approaches to performing those same processes.
• Gain experience. Capturing tacit knowledge relies heavily on going through a process of trial and error. Tacit knowledge is experiential knowledge, and practice is the only way to gain experience. Along the way, listen to advice and share knowledge as well. As you become more experienced, you’ll also become more adept at the transfer of tacit knowledge from yourself to less experienced team members.
• Seek out mentors. Experienced employees can serve as case studies for how to put organizational tacit knowledge in action. See if you can shadow a more senior employee and benefit from their mentoring. Gain tacit knowledge of your own by gleaning information from the knowledge of a mentor.

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