Tacit vs Explicit Knowledge
Definition
Michael Polanyi’s distinction between two fundamentally different forms of knowledge:
- Explicit knowledge — can be articulated, written down, encoded in formal language. Transferable through documents, code, video, formulas.
- Tacit knowledge — not fully articulable. Lives in skill, intuition, judgment, body memory. Transferable only through shared practice — apprenticeship, mentoring, doing.
“We know more than we can tell.” — Polanyi, The Tacit Dimension (1966)
Why it matters
The fundamental problem of every Knowledge Management System: most valuable knowledge in an organization is tacit, and tacit knowledge does not survive a resignation, an exam period, or a hiring freeze.
The job of a KMS is to make the tacit-to-explicit conversion routine enough that the org doesn’t lose key capability when people leave.
Examples in NOTQIN context
| Tacit knowledge | What an explicit version would look like |
|---|---|
| Operator knows the press is about to jam from the sound | Vibration-signature spec + threshold + alert config |
| Salesperson reading a buyer’s posture in a meeting | Discovery-call script + objection-handling playbook |
| Ahmed’s intuition that “this prospect is wasting our time” | A formal qualification rubric in the NOTQIN Pilot Playbook |
| Tertius Zitzke knowing which mining customers are price-cyclical | Customer segmentation model with maturity + cycle exposure factors |
How to convert tacit → explicit
- Shadowing + observation notes
- Structured interviews (“walk me through the last time you decided to…“)
- After-Action Reviews (After-Action Reviews)
- The Externalization mode of the SECI Model
- Voice transcription + LLM summarization (modern shortcut, see Augmented Intelligence and RAG)
Common mistakes
- Believing tacit knowledge can be fully captured (it can’t — see Polanyi’s “ineffable” residue)
- Forcing premature externalization — people stop sharing when capture feels like surveillance
- Capturing only what’s easy to write (procedures), missing the harder judgment knowledge (heuristics)
- Treating tacit knowledge as “vague” or “soft” when it’s often the most economically valuable form
See also
- SECI Model — the conversion framework
- DIKW Pyramid
- Communities of Practice — primary tacit-knowledge transfer mechanism
- Knowledge Management Systems — Foundations