Note: this is Part 1 in a series about tacit knowledge.
This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://commoncog.com/tacit-knowledge-is-a-real-thing/
This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://commoncog.com/tacit-knowledge-is-a-real-thing/
Just sharing this diagram that I found useful for understanding the different degrees of tacitness within a company.
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Itās from Strategy Praxis: Insight-Driven, First Principles-Based Strategic Thinking, Analysis, and Decision-Making, a new book about strategy.
It seems there isnāt much written about tacit knowledge per se (Iāve only just started reading about it), but here is the relevant section that relates to the schema:
Where Do Capabilities Reside Within an Organisation?
There is considerable debate in the management literature over where capabilities reside within an organisation. The debate centres on whether core capabilities necessarily reside only at the corporate level of an organisation or whether they can be thought of as being distributed across various levels. The view taken here is that if the qualifying distinction of core capabilities is their ability to endow competitive advantage, then it stands to reason that they may well reside at multiple organisational levels of a firm. The debate on where capabilities reside within an organisation notwithstanding, there appears to be general consensus that a capability necessarily involves more than one individual. The fact that āa capability cannot walk out the doorā implies that the people-embodied knowledge and skills component of a capability entails a collective of people and not a single individual.
Tacitness of Capabilities
The tacit character of capabilities derives from their intrinsic link to organisational knowledge and deeply embedded informal organisational factors. The tacit nature of capabilities presents significant challenges in their analysis. On the one hand, the tacitness of capabilities provides protective mechanisms by presenting barriers to their diffusion. For example the knowledge component of capabilities which encompasses deeply embedded expertise, experience, routines, and practices is difficult to replicate and transfer outside the firm. On the other hand, same characteristics of capabilities that pose barriers to their diffusion outside the firm frequently impose limitations on their effective deployment and exploitation within a firm. Firms often donāt know the full extent of what they know and are capable of doing. Consequently, some capabilities lie dormant and are unused. Dysfunctionalities within an organisation frequently add obstacles to the effective deployment of capabilities.
That being said, capabilities can take on a variety of forms that exhibit varying degrees of tacitness. The degree of tacitness of a capability is ultimately determined by its composition. While all capabilities feature elements of the four defining dimensions, the contributions of these dimensions to a capability are, as a rule, not equally distributed. For example highly knowledge-intensive capabilities which rely on deep expertise are disproportionately dependent on their people-embodied knowledge component and much less so on their physicalātechnical systems constituent.
Knowledge assets generally, and individual constituents of a capability in particular, feature varying degrees of tacitnessāfrom those ājust under the surfaceā to those deeply embedded in an organisationās cultural realm. The tacitness of capabilities is therefore more appropriately described in terms of a spectrum which ranges from barely discernible to highly obscure, as suggested in Fig. 4.16."
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Itās very nice to see this kind of material on CommonCog! Tacit knowledge became a big topic in the knowledge management field maybe around ten years ago. It went with the maturation of the field when people realized that not all knowledge could be captured in one big database. Much useful knowledge resided with experts, and much of it was indeed tacit.
I guess Gary Klein is not normally seen as a āKM guyā but I started reading him via that field. I was looking for knowledge model visualizations and came across the technique of Concept Mapping. Itās described fully in Kleinās āWorking Minds: a Practitionerās Guide to Cognitive Task Analysisā. That book got me interested in Kleinās research on tacit knowledge.
But it turns out that Klein has stronger connections to KM: he has done various things with Patrick Lambe, who runs Straits Knowledge in Singapore:
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One of many references in Kleinās online article āUnpacking Tacit Knowledgeā is to a new book by Lambe.
Lambe is big in knowledge organization and knowledge management. His ābibleā is Organizing Knowledge, a big book that includes good thinking on tacit knowledge. Thatās not traditionally a strong area for taxonomists like Lambe, who prefer the explicit kind of knowlege. But Lambe is not a traditional taxonomist, despite having the official badges, as it were.
Anyway, Klein talks about Lambeās new book on knowledge audits having good material on tacit knowledge. Itās called āPrinciples of knowledge auditingā. -
Here are the sketchnotes from a workshop that Klein and Lambe ran together in Singapore in 2011: Insights on your organisation through the power of story
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Hereās a video of Klein, Lambe, and Dave Snowden (of Cynefin!) Green Chameleon Ā» Gary Klein and Dave Snowden on KM and Singaporeās Risk Assessment and Horizon Scanning System
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Iāve actually come across Straits Knowledge and Lambe before (I was researching ties between Klein and Snowden) but I donāt fully understand what the field is, or does.
I know this is somewhat unrelated (or is it?) to the topic at hand, but what exactly is KM? It seemed to be hot in the 90s, but all I can find are traces of the field. What are its goals, what are its methods, and in your opinion, @joepairman, has it succeeded at delivering on them? Where is the field today?
Iāve only seen references to KM practices in Kleinās older work, e.g. he makes a throwaway remark in https://forum.commoncog.com/t/learning-from-workplace-experts-using-the-rpd-model/1752/2 where he says:
If an explanation of KM is too long and unwieldy for this comments section, feel free to split it into a different topic! Iāve long had questions about this, but I havenāt had the time to go digging.
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(Continuing the thread with a relevant Klein + KM paper I just read, and firstly keeping things tidy by linking out to the generic KM topic I started)
I did kick off an āExperiences of Knowledge Managementā thread with a long though subjective overview of KM.
More relevant to the conversation in this thread was a paper I read today called āExpertise Management: Challenges for adopting Naturalistic Decision Making as a knowledge management paradigmā. Itās by Brian Moon, Holly Baxter, and Gary Klein, giants in NDM.
Now, Klein has presented at KM World several times, worked with KM people, and does really see NDM as under the purview of KM. From the paper:
Since expertise is one of the most valuable assets in any organization, it stands to reason that adopting the perspectives and methods of NDM as a KM paradigm ā i.e., Expertise Management ā should enable organizations to realize performance improvements.
But the paper is about challenges for Expertise Management (EM) as a KM paradigm, and it certainly finds lots of them.
Firstly, thereās the challenge of getting EM accepted as a first-class citizen in the KM toolkit. There are a few nice words about expertise but not much serious EM practice in mainstream KM, nor serious treatment of it in KM literature.
Partly thatās because KM folk tend to come from information management or management consulting type backgrounds. And itās also because, overall, KM does tend to over-emphasize the role of technology. Thatās in line with what @cedric mentioned:
But it goes further than just āpeople donāt always use the techā to the impression that with fixed KM budgets, tech crowds out the human aspect:
any KM approach that is principally human-centered often struggles to gain audience.
But much of the paper talks about the remaining challenges once an organization has committed to trying EM seriously. Doing it properly can take more time (hence cost) than an organization can justify, and ROI is tricky to prove. Also, some experts donāt think much of NDM approaches ā one told one of the authors āI think it is a bunch of crapā.
And even some of the willing experts have so much depth of experience, or experience of such a particular nature, or of such a wide domain breadth, that the Critical Decision Method or Concept Mapping simply canāt work that well. (This bit of the paper is particularly worth reading even if you skim the rest.)
So overall it is a bit bleak, though it ends upbeat (or tries to). There have been real successes, especially those closer to the paperās publication date of 2015. And the techniques in EM can bring so much to organizations at risk of losing skills and expertise as people retire.
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