Results tagged “tacit knowledge” from KM Edge: Where the best in Knowledge Management come together

We in knowledge management place such a premium on tacit knowledge that explicit knowledge would get its feelings hurt, if it had any.

Tacit knowledge is what people carry in their heads as a consequence of education and experience. It enables them to respond effectively to new situations, act on their hunches, and--as Malcolm Gladwell would say--generally "blink" well.

Explicit knowledge, on the other hand, is codified knowledge--information and data. It takes the form of documents, e-mails and, more and more often, social networking comments.  And it can get you into at least as much trouble as acting on your hunches.

Last week, APQC had the pleasure to host Dr. Gerald (Jerry) Blanton as a guest facilitator of our monthly KM community call. The central question that Dr. Blanton raised during the call was: How do you know when you've reached the limits of effectiveness of explicit knowledge? While the idea of codifying tacit knowledge is a basic tenet of knowledge management, would it be a good thing if all knowledge became explicit (even if that were possible)? Dr. Blanton suggests no--that even the crush of existing explicit/documented knowledge has reached diminishing returns and, in fact, become detrimental to sharing and absorbing knowledge in practical terms.

That's the question that Dr. Gerald (Jerry) Blanton would like to ask during APQC's October KM community call. I've had the good fortune to work with Jerry for the past four years or so supporting the knowledge management strategies of the U.S. Navy's Carrier Team One group. Although Jerry can wax philosophical with the best of them, he's also a practitioner concerned about knowledge sharing and learning at the point of use. So with that background, when I invited Jerry to facilitate our next call, he proposed the topic of if and when collected explicit content is too much.