The following is from Jeffrey Pfeffer in Strategy and Business.
"Over the years, you become very skilled at what you do. But if I ask you to give somebody else a formula so that they can be as effective as you, you can't. They would have to be with you. They would have to apprentice with you, they would have to chat with you. And over a period of time, they would begin to become as skilled as you are.
WALLY'S COMMENT ... In the last 15 years or so, we've seen an attempt to develop expert systems to reduce training costs and increase the amount of decision making handled by technology rather than by individual people. Pfeffer's statement helps us see that there are really two kinds of knowledge that can be captured in this way.
There is knowledge that can be reduced to rules usually if/then rules. Those can be incorporated into expert systems and other knowledge management tools.
When that happens they become what knowledge management folks call "explicit knowledge."
There is other knowledge, though, that resides in the heads of people. We often refer to this as the "lore" of a particular job, profession, or industry. Since it remains in the heads of people, knowledge management folks call this "tacit knowledge."
The reasons that this material remains tacit fall into two groups.
Some of it remains tacit because it is simply too complex or too subtle to be captured with the existing technology. I remember a time several years ago, when expert systems had just begun to come on the seen, that I was trying to develop one with a client. We were trying to do what people like Dupont and Campbell's Soup had done--capture the knowledge of an exceptionally talented and effective worker who was about to retire. The idea was that if we could incorporate some of that worker's decision making into an expert system, the system would perform better than a new apprentice learning the trade.
Very quickly, we discovered that the number of rules necessary with their weightings, complexity, and shadings were far too much to expect the system to handle for this particular application. Since the worker was amenable, we worked out a special deal where he retired and then worked as a consultant whose time gradually diminished over a five year period.
During that time, he worked on both the expert system and with three apprentices.
The result at the end of the project was that we had two people who had picked up a lot of what our expert knew. Their work was supplemented by an expert system that aided them in decision making. What's interesting to me, is that neither of those apprentices ever achieved the level that the master had, even with the expert system help. It convinced me that some types of knowledge are really best, at least for the present, when they reside in the heads of talented human beings who are passionate about their work.
The other reason that knowledge remains tacit often is that no one asks people to share it. Almost any senior sales, production, or customer service manager in any industry carries around a wealth of information and knowledge that never gets shared because no one asks and there aren't occasions for sharing.
I'm not sure what the answer for this is. One thing I think you should do, if you're in a larger organization, is get those senior people together on a regular basis, especially as they approach the time when they'll leave the company. Ask them what tricks they've learned, ask them to share good stories, and pick up out of those stories and tips the stuff of which knowledge is made.
This article originally appeared in Wally Bock's Briefing Memo newsletter in 1999.
Reviewed: 2/15/03
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