The title for this post is taken from a 1993 RAND report written by two friends and former colleagues. It is occasionally useful to revisit the first principles when discussing weighty matters such as KM. Or, as was the case for my friends, U.S. Strategic Forces.
A recent conversation on Twitter involved a fairly innocuous blog posting that discussed briefly the notion of tacit and explicit knowledge. The problem, for me, is the definition for tacit knowledge in this blog was “that which has not been recorded, written, printed, or otherwise captured in some medium.” Explicit knowledge, by contrast, has been. Therefore, the challenge is to make tacit knowledge explicit – because knowledge is only transferred through explicit mediums. To quote:
Unless converted into explicit knowledge, it cannot be shared because it is ‘trapped’ in one’s mind.
The post also referenced a second gentleman, who posed an even more pithy and awful definitional distinction:
He says that the tacit-explicit distinction is abstract and, in reality, knowledge is ‘either findable by your computer or it is not findable by your computer.’
Rather than just letting it go as the Bride often advises, I sent a brief message to the first gentleman, expressing my nonconcurrence with his definitions. Through the magic of Twitter, this became a conversation enjoined by several souls, and I was finally challenged to provide some primary sources that inform my apparent heartburn.
In all honesty, while the ensuing discussion may appear “abstract” to some, the nature of knowlege should be at least partially understood if one is to consider themselves a practitioner of knowledge management. Else, content yourself to the vital and growing field of information management – there is no shame in this whatsoever.
It is important here to note that the original post was intended to briefly acknowledge the academic distinctions, but more to exhort people to share the knowledge trapped in their heads. I agree with this noble intent, but fear the post does violence to related theory. Believing that knowledge is only transferred once it has been made explicit leads to mechanistic, engineering approaches to knowledge management that have not proven their worth. Crank it out of people’s heads, churn it into a shared taxonomy or tag it somehow, and then – and only then – is it useful to others. I would like to know the exact date that the apprentice learning model was made obsolete by advanced information technology.
While a tidy approach to KM (actually more an approach to information management), the call to “make tacit knowledge explicit” ignores much of what we know about how the world actually works. To be more precise, we are learning the limitations of what we can know as a result of research across the disciplines of sociology, neuroscience, anthropology, and others.
Last caveat, I do not have much argument with the practitioners who offered via Twitter that tacit knowledge can be made “partially explicit,” or with the gentleman who offered that the fragmented chatter on Twitter was actually an idea way to begin sharing tacit knowledge. The promise of social media indeed is that serendipitous connections of people, linked via fragmented information, is a step towards knowledge management that recognizes the fruitlessness of other approaches – including ones that seek to harvest tacit knowledge into explicit knowledge bins.
Here then, my brief list of “first principles” to understand before drawing conclusions regarding the “implementation” of KM. If these are true, they should change your view on “making tacit knowledge explicit.”
0. Principle zero: define the terms. Where did we get this term “tacit knowledge?” Michael Polanyi described it this way:
Thus to speak a language is to commit ourselves to the double indeterminancy due to our reliance both on its formalism and on our own continued reconsideration of this formalism in its bearing on our experience. For just as, owing to the ultimately tacit character of all our knowledge, we remain ever unable to say all that we know, so also, in the view of the tacit character of meaning, we can never quite know what is implied in what we say.
While technically true that “not findable on your computer” agrees with this paragraph, I find that characterization falls short of Polanyi’s meaning.
1. We don’t know how we know what we know, or make decisions; and therefore unwittingly misrepresent what we know when asked to describe the process. Lakoff claims that understanding “takes place in terms of entire domains of experience and not in terms of isolated concepts.” He shows how these experiences are a product of:
- Our bodies (perceptual and motor apparatus, mental capacities, emotional makeup, etc.)
- Our interactions with our physical environment (moving, manipulating objects, eating, etc.)
- Our interactions with other people within our culture (in terms of social, political, economic, and religious institutions) p.117
Gompert, et al., examined the dual roles of information and intuition in decision-making in their investigation into how to increase “battle wisdom” for U.S. forces. Asking General Patton how he made the decisions he did will not prepare you to respond similiarly in like circumstances.
Snowden puts it this way:
There is an increasing body of research data which indicates that in the practice of knowledge people use heuristics, past pattern matching and extrapolation to make decisions, coupled with complex blending of ideas and experiences that takes place in nanoseconds. Asked to describe how they made a decision after the event they will tend to provide a more structured process oriented approach which does not match reality.
Medina agrees:
The brain constantly receives new inputs and needs to store some of them in the same head already occupied by previous experiences. It makes sense of its world by trying to connect new information to previously encountered information, which means that new information routinely resculpts previously existing representations and sends the re-created whole back for new storage. What does this mean? Merely that present knowledge can bleed into past memories and become intertwined with them as if they were encountered together. Does that give you only an approximate view of reality? You bet it does. p.130
2. We learn through fragmented input and internal cognitive patterns, embedding extensive context from our environment at the time of learning. Medina, discussing the work of Nobel Laureate Eric Kandel (2000), relates how the brain rewires itself.
Kandel showed that when people learn something, the wiring in their brain changes. He demonstrated that acquiring even simple pieces of information involves the physical alteration of the structure of the neurons participating in the process. p.57
Fauconnier and Turner discuss cognition – in part – in terms of guiding principle for completing patterns, as humans seek to blend new concepts onto what they already know.
Pattern Completion Principle: Other things being equal, complete elements in the blend by using existing integrated patterns as additional inputs. Other things being equal, use a completing frame that has relations that can be the compressed versions of the important outer-space vital relations between the inputs. p.328
Brown, et al, take on traditional teaching methods in their work showing that “knowledge is situated, being in part a product of the activity, context, and culture in which it is developed and used.”
The activity in which knowledge is developed and deployed, it is now argued, is not separable from or ancillary to learning and cognition. Nor is it neutral. Rather, it is an integral part of what is learned. Situations might be said to co-produce knowledge through activity. Learning and cognition, it is now possible to argue, are fundamentally situated.
The context within which something is learned cannot be reduced to information metadata – it is an integral part of what is learned.
3. We always know more than we can say, and we will always say more than we can write down. For my third principle, I am borrowing directly from Dave Snowden’s extension of Polanyi. (Snowden’s blog should be at the top of your KM reading list):
The process of taking things from our heads, to our mouths (speaking it) to our hands (writing it down) involves loss of content and context. It is always less than it could have been as it is increasingly codified.
Having read through the first two principles, it should now be evident that relating what we know via conversation or writing or other means of “making explicit” removes integral context, and therefore content. Explicit knowledge is simply information – lacking the human context necessary to qualify it as knowledge. Sharing human knowledge is a misnomer, the most we can do is help others embed inputs as we have done so that they may approach the world as we do based on our experience. This sharing is done on many levels, in many media, and in contexts as close to the original ones so that the experience can approximate the original.
The grandfather above will not conduct after-action reviews regarding his fishing experiences, write a pamphlet about fishing, and upload it to the family intranet. Rather, he will take the boy fishing – where he will show him to tie lures, cast effectively, breathe in the experience, and hopefully learn to love what he loves.
References:
Brown, J. S., Collins, A., & Duguid, P. (1989). Situated Cognition and the Culture of Learning. Educational Researcher, January-February, 32-42.
Fauconnier, G., & Turner, M. (2002). The Way We Think: Conceptual Blending and the Mind’s Hidden Complexities. New York, NY: Basic Books, Perseus Books Group.
Gompert, D. C., Lachow, I., & Perkins, J. (2006). Battle-Wise: Seeking Time-Information Superiority in Networked Warfare. Washington, DC: National Defense University Press.
Lakoff, G., & Johnson, M. (1980). Metaphors We Live By. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press.
Medina, J. (2008). Brain Rules: 12 Principles for Surviving and Thriving at Work, Home, and School. Seattle, WA: Pear Press.
Polanyi, M. (1974). Personal Knowledge: Towards a Post-Critical Philosophy. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Snowden, D. J. (2008, October 10). Rendering Knowledge. Retrieved January 5, 2009, from http://www.cognitive-edge.com/blogs/dave/2008/10/rendering_knowledge.php
January 5, 2009 at 3:36 pm
Excellent synthesis on the conversations and focus back on basics. It’s always challenging trying to describe tacit and explicit knowledge and how best to share and learn. It’s vital though in that we can’t help our organizations without understanding the basics behind human behavior and successful methods here.
January 5, 2009 at 6:01 pm
Wonderful conversation. I guess ultimately, the thing to recognize is that while we may not ever truly capture any tacit knowledge, we can try to help people understand what we use to make decisions. We can share our opinions, we can share our decisions as we make them with possible links to references or patterns of behavior that we have observed in the past, or other information that may lead us to make a decision and take the corresponding action necessary. I realize this is not perfect and that in each situation, the context is truly the key but at least we can try and by trying gain hopefully better information and be able to reach better decisions than if we had tried to make the decisions based on less than perfect experiences or pattern recognition aptitude. So ultimately, I push back and say while this analysis may be true, what can we do to help people make better decisions and take action instead of waiting until the correct action is clear? (Unless of course it turns out that is the right thing to do based on all supporting inputs.)
January 6, 2009 at 1:23 pm
Another source that supports your conclusions about the role of context in decision-making (if I am remembering it correctly) is Lucy Suchman’s “Plans and Situated Actions.” It’s been a long time since I read but you might be interested in it.
January 6, 2009 at 1:32 pm
Looks like Suchman is more narrowly focused on the impact of context-based decision-making on computer interface design, so it’s probably not that relevant here. Guess maybe it would have made sense to look the book up BEFORE I recommended it. Heh.
January 6, 2009 at 3:52 pm
I think there is still a definitional issue here. KNOWLEDGE is a noun, not a verb. It’s a THING, not a “process”. I believe that making tacit knowledge explicit is possible. I teach my daughter that 2+2=4. Regardless of the context in which I teach it, when she grasps the KNOWLEDGE of that fact, it is a THING that can be passed on again, and can be made explicit (just as I have done here). The PROCESS of *learning* or of *decision making* requires knowledge as an input. Likely, it requires context as an input, as well as many other things not listed here. So Dr Bordeaux’s observations are “spot on” for how *learning* occurs, or what process is used for decision making, but the explicit “thing” that knowledge represents can be passed on. While I may not use the same process as General Patton (though the military attempts to teach that as well in the “Military Decision-Making Process”), I can gain the knowledge he may have passed on about the inputs he used in his decision-making, and the resultant decision he made. That knowledge can be passed on. Will I do it exactly the same way? Probably not. But will I do it differently having had access to General Patton’s explicit knowledge than if I were not privy to it? Absolutely. Does it not then follow that adding to the breadth of explicit knowledge into which one may tap is of value and a goal toward which we shoudl strive as a “first principle” of knowledge management?
January 6, 2009 at 4:02 pm
Chris: Very good points, thanks for the comment. Yes, we should absolutely grow information stores such as mathematical relations and such – no question there. Acquiring literacy based on the information produced by prior knowledge processing is essential to success in professions and life in general. I don’t think we’re arguing here, and I didn’t mean to imply there is no value in sharing information artifacts. However, there are some – including myself – who believe knowledge is a thing AND a flow. Knowledge is, for some of us, therefore a paradox. I’ve focused on individual knowledge in this article. However, consider organizational “knowledge” in the examples you used. What, really, does an organization “know?” It “knows” what is in its databases, but also what its members talk about. The sum of organizational knowledge is not an aggregate of what its members know, or what is uploaded to the intranet, but rather what members talk about – or share.
January 6, 2009 at 4:02 pm
Lisa: Hey, the application of these ideas is essential – thanks for the reference!
January 8, 2009 at 7:08 am
I unfortunately missed the initial conversation leading to this excellent, thoughtful post. So I may not have the required background to step into the discussion…
Interestingly, I have no problem with the definition of Tacit Knowledge put forward in the 2nd paragraph — “That which has not been recorded, written, printed, or otherwise captured in some medium”. KM as a discipline has always distinguished itself by endless debate about defining its own terminology… However, I strongly disagree with the suggestion (which is presented as an implication from the definition above) that “Knowledge is only transferred through explicit mediums” of course. And I do strongly agree with the principles presented in this post.
I’ve worked in KM (and Competency Development) for over 15 years now, and since its first publication in 1995 I have been applying the approach of Nonoka & Takeuchi (“The Knowledge Creating Company”, New York, NY, Oxford University Press) when it comes to dealing with Tacit and Explicit Knowledge.
When Knowledge is transferred, it is transformed! This transformation can be enriching (e.g., I may expand on the Knowledge that I “receive” applying my personal background and experience), but it is also not lossless (e.g., I will not “get” everything as intended by the author, and I will interpret where required or allowed). Those stating that only Explicit Knowledge can be transferred may not realize that, to be exploited, Knowledge must be interpreted/integrated (in someone’s head, therefore Tacit). Using Knowledge involves context. To quote Nonoka & Takeuchi: “Knowledge, unlike information, is about beliefs and commitments”…
So it is rather the contrary then, Knowledge can ONLY be transferred through successive transformations that inevitably involve Tacit Knowledge! (one may argue that explicit knowledge can be transferred directly between automated devices, but what’s the point?)
Despite advances in cognitive science and semantic processing, it is still largely people that process knowledge, not IT. And it is the context (including background and foreground, in the Gestalt meaning of the word) in which people process knowledge that impacts its nature, value, etc.
So, yes please, let’s take that boy out fishing!
January 9, 2009 at 12:47 pm
Another contemporary source is:
Mirrors in the Brain: How Our Minds Share Actions, Emotions, and Experience by by Giacomo Rizzolatti (Author), Corrado Sinigaglia (Author), Frances Anderson (Translator) (Book)
We can learn by watching other people! And we can teach by doing!
Good reflexion, thanks
Joel
twitter.com/Joel_Muzard
February 10, 2010 at 1:04 pm
This is an excellent conversation and it ties together some very important points. I became reflective in a sort of “retrospective” sort of way in relationship to the fishing instruction approach that might be taken by the Grandfather. As we consider the flurry of attention toward social media technology and its relationship to knowledge sharing, we might observe that the very notion of “small messages” shared between others start to build collective insight in a way that the “long narrative” may not. The notion that in constructing a long narrative, we lose both content and context is worthy of consideration. The very act of deciding what to write down forces us to consider and therefor not write down certain things. If that be the case, then the short “micro-blog” like messages we get via different services offer tiny insights into a “tacit” understanding and thereby encourage others that are interested to join one another in a viable knowledge transfer activity that will likely take form in a real fishing expedition.