Tacit Knowledge: Capture, Sharing, And Unwritten Assumptions

Abstract

The transfer of tacit knowledge from those who have it to those who need it is often seen as the Holy Grail of knowledge management. Yet the literature on tacit knowledge gives mixed messages about the feasibility of, or techniques for, transferring tacit knowledge, and it is difficult to evaluate the strengths of the competing claims. Part of the problem is that there are several debates in the knowledge management community that affect authors’ underlying assumptions about tacit knowledge, but authors of papers often fail to make clear their position on these various debates. This is ironic, given the topic being discussed.

This paper is intended to make clear the key underlying assumptions in the literature that are relevant to capture and sharing of tacit knowledge. Four such assumptions are discussed: whether tacit knowledge includes all knowledge that is not explicit; whether tacit knowledge is unrecordable or simply unrecorded; whether knowledge can be owned by groups as well as individuals; and whether the capture of partial knowledge is a necessary step in knowledge sharing, or a waste of effort because the subjectivity of the knowledge structures in an expert’s head means that, if knowledge can be captured at all, it must be captured in its entirety or vital context is lost.

The paper makes some recommendations for classifying tacit knowledge, and for capture (where feasible) and sharing techniques for different categories of tacit knowledge.