Tacit knowledge

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The concept of tacit knowing comes from scientist and philosopher Michael Polanyi. It is important to understand that he wrote about a process (hence tacit knowing) and not a form of knowledge. However, his phrase has been taken up to name a form of knowledge that is apparently wholly or partly inexplicable.

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[edit] Definition

With tacit knowledge, people are not often aware of the knowledge they possess or how it can be valuable to others. Tacit knowledge is considered more valuable because it provides context for people, places, ideas, and experiences. Effective transfer of tacit knowledge generally requires extensive personal contact and trust.

Tacit knowledge is not easily shared. One of Polanyi's famous aphorisms is: "We know more than we can tell." Tacit knowledge consists often of habits and culture that we do not recognize in ourselves. In the field of knowledge management the concept of tacit knowledge refers to a knowledge which is only known by an individual and that is difficult to communicate to the rest of an organization. Knowledge that is easy to communicate is called explicit knowledge. The process of transforming tacit knowledge into explicit knowledge is known as codification or articulation.

[edit] Examples

One example of tacit knowledge is one's ability to recognize his or her mother's face. In a matrix of 1000 similar faces, the son or daughter would almost always recognize the mother's face. However, he or she would have an extremely difficult time instructing a stranger how to identify the proper face. In this sense the son or daughter knows the mother's face in a way he or she cannot tell to someone who does not know that face personally.

Another example that Polanyi gives is the way a doctor learns how to distinguish a true epilleptic seizure from a false one. Polanyi observed a medical professor instruct his students that he could not tell his students how to distinguish them, but they would learn with time and experience.

A third example is the way a blind person uses a cane to feel objects on the other end of the cain. Through experience, the person learns to feel through the cain and tend not to the impact of the cain on the hand but tend to the impact of the cain on the object at the other end. The blind person cannot tell about the impact on the hand with as much accuracy as she can tell about the object at the other end - in part because the impacts on the hand are only intelligible to other humans in terms of the object on the other end. Polanyi generalized this example to model how humans experience reality. We experience reality through the "cains" of language, concepts, presuppositions, culture, etc. We thus know reality tacitly in the sense that we can only make contact with the real world by experiencing it through mediums which we cannot completely explain and about which we are usually not even aware.[1]

[edit] Knowledge management

According to Parsaye, there are three major approaches to the capture of Tacit Knowledge from groups and individuals. They are:

  • Interviewing experts.
  • Learning by being told.
  • Learning by observation.

Interviewing experts can be done in the form of structured interviewing or by recording organizational stories. Structured interviewing of experts in a particular subject is the most commonly used technique to capture pertinent explicit knowledge. An example of a structured interview would be an exit interview. Learning by being told can be done by interviewing or by task analysis. Either way an expert teaches the novice the processes of a task. Task analysis is the process of determining the actual task or policy by breaking it down and analyzing what needs to be done to complete the task. Learning by observation can be done by presenting the expert with a sample problem, scenario, or case study and then observing the process used to solve the problem.

There are many other techniques that can be utilized to capture tacit knowledge. They are:

  • Ad hoc sessions
  • E-learning
  • Action learning
  • Learning history
  • Road maps

All of these approaches should be recorded in order to transfer the tacit Knowledge into reusable explicit knowledge.

[edit] Controversies

With some regularity there are critical voices arguing that an understanding as formulated above is a mainstream but faulty interpretation of Michael Polanyi's work.[2] Tacit and explicit should not be understood as characteristics of knowledge, which is missing the point that Polanyi was trying to make largely. Polanyi's point was that knowing always had an indispensable personal component. With this he was critiquing an objectivist position of which he was deeply worried for its lack of ethical commitment or considerations. Building on the general ideas from Gestalt-psychology he described a difference between two kinds of awareness: subsidiary and focal awareness. In our focal awareness we are aware of a coherent whole, a Gestalt. In our subsidiary awareness we implicitly are conscious of the different impressions, memories that build this Gestalt. This Gestalt is not given, but it is an achievement, realized by interpretative skills.

The whole notion of explicit knowledge as something that could be captured in an information system is at odds with this interplay between subsidiary and focal awareness, just as the mainstream definition of tacit knowledge as something unknowable or belonging to the subconscious. The tacit can be known but only in terms of the Gestalt that it bears on. The explicit is gone in the next moment, when a new Gestalt is formed in the focal awareness. Polanyi described this interplay between subsidiary and focal awareness as indwelling. We indwell our interpretative frameworks so that we order and select our impressions. We indwell our integrative skills so that we focus on what we want to achieve and our bodily skills implement what is needed. The focus is a Gestalt that is produced from the subsidiary particles, just as it is something that summons bodily skills.
The implications of this paradigm of indwelling (Sanders, 1998), have hardly been touched upon. Brohm (2005) explains this process of indwelling in terms of a stage metaphor. On the stage there is a focus in the play, an event in the theatre play (i.e. focal awareness), pointed at by the spotlight. Around the light circle on the stage there are actors, attributes (i.e. impressions). It is the director that has arranged the parts in such a way that the whole emerged from its parts (i.e. integrative skills).

Image:knowingtheatre.jpg

The main benefit of this stage metaphor is that it counters the popular metaphor of the iceberg (the subconscious/tacit under water, the explicit above water). The metaphor shows the dynamics and interdependence between explicit and tacit knowledge.
The implications of such a reading of Polanyi are manifold. Firstly, true discovery comes from an intention to be submerged in the phenomena under study, thereby emphasizing participatory observations as a method. Secondly, there is no knowledge transfer, but it is possible to indwell the actions from a master in order to gradually reconstruct skills. Thirdly, knowledge and ethics are inherently connected. There is no neutral knowledge. Any claim to knowledge reflects a particular standpoint, interpretative framework etc., as there is no explicit knowledge that is simply given. Fourthly, since we all have a personal history, a particular education and socialization there can be quite different perspectives. But the problems in organizations or societies can be so complex that different perspectives are relevant. In such a case organizing should be an emergent process to allow for differences and even make use of that. Such a constellation Polanyi named polycentric order.


[edit] See also

[edit] References

  1. ^ McEnerney Lectures, 1962
  2. ^ See Brohm, 1999; Tsoukas, 2003; Patriotta, 2004

[edit] Further reading

  • Bao, Y.; Zhao, S. (2004), "MICRO Contracting for Tacit Knowledge - A Study of Contractual Arrangements in International Technology Transfer", in Problems and Perspectives of Management, 2, 279- 303.
  • Brohm, R. Bringing Polanyi onto the theatre stage: a study on Polanyi applied to Knowledge Management, in: Proceedings of the ISMICK Conference, Erasmus University, Rotterdam, The Netherlands, 1999, pp. 57–69.
  • Brohm, R. "Polycentric Order in Organizations", published dissertation by ERIM, Erasmus University Rotterdam: Rotterdam, 2005. http://hdl.handle.net/1765/6911
  • Collins, H.M. "Tacit Knowledge, Trust and the Q of Sapphire" Social Studies of Science' p. 71-85 31(1) 2001
  • Dalkir, Kimiz (2005) "Knowledge Management in Theory and Practice" pp. 82–90
  • Nonaka, I and Takeuchi, H. The Knowledge Creating Company Oxford University Press, 1995
  • Patriotta, G. (2004). Studying organizational knowledge. Knowledge Management Research and Practice, 2(1).
  • Ploszajski, P.; Saquet, A.; Segalla, M. Le savoir tacite dans un contexte culturel (z: ), Les Echos, Le Quotidien de L’Economie, 18 Novembre 2004, Paris 2004
  • Polanyi, Michael. "The Tacit Dimension". First published Doubleday & Co, 1966. Reprinted Peter Smith, Gloucester, Mass, 1983. Chapter 1: "Tacit Knowing".
  • Sanders, A. F. (1988). Michael Polanyi's post critical epistemology, a reconstruction of some aspects of 'tacit knowing'. Amsterdam: Rodopi.
  • Tsoukas, H. (2003) ‘Do we really understand tacit knowledge?’ in The Blackwell handbook of organizational learning and knowledge management. Easterby-Smith and Lyles (eds), 411-427. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell Publishing .

[edit] External links

Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tacit_knowledge"
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