‘There’s no set method; I just know what works.’ ✨
That’s the answer you get when you ask a top-performing salesperson how they consistently close deals.
And yes, it can be frustrating if you’re looking for answers you can apply to your own job, but for many experts, their expertise comes from years of trial and error and subtle observations, not handbooks or training sessions.
This is tacit knowledge.
Philosopher Michael Polanyi first articulated the term ‘tacit knowledge’ for skills or intuition that we acquire through personal experience but can’t put into words.
In this blog, we’ll explore the concept’s origins, evolution, and why capturing it for organizational success is essential. 🎯
What Is Tacit Knowledge? Definition, Benefits and Examples
⏰ 60-Second Summary
- Tacit knowledge is an almost innate sense of knowing something, gained through personal experience. It is often hard to articulate or document
- It differs from explicit knowledge, which is structured and easily shared through manuals or databases
- Methods to share tacit knowledge include mentorship, storytelling, and embedding learning in workflows
- Capturing tacit knowledge, though difficult, can help foster innovation, collaboration, and growth while retaining critical organizational insights
- Tools like help to streamline documentation and foster knowledge sharing
Understanding Tacit Knowledge
Tacit knowledge is a collection of personal insights and experiences that is difficult to articulate or document. It includes skills, intuition, judgment, and ideas gained through personal experience and context.
Individuals continually acquire personal knowledge, which changes their behaviors and perceptions, making it an uncaptured form of expertise. This ‘tribal knowledge’ spreads informally throughout organizations. Here’s how it’s usually acquired:
- Getting hands-on experience during real-life situations
- Observing and shadowing experienced individuals
- Working closely with a mentor to learn through practice and feedback
- Listening to personal experiences and lessons
Tacit knowledge manifests in many ways. You can pick it up through nonverbal cues during negotiation (if you’re in sales) or when you create art based on instinct and emotion.
📌 Example: When onboarding new employees, knowledge managers often share insights and practical advice, like navigating company politics. These insights aren’t documented but are invaluable to accelerating their learning curve.
But with an intelligent assistant that has access to your entire workspace, insights can be pulled from conversational threads, docs, and even from meeting transcripts instantly. See how!
Tacit vs. implicit vs. explicit knowledge
To effectively leverage organizational insights, you must gauge the difference between tacit, implicit, and explicit knowledge.
Here’s a comparison table to help. 💪
| Criteria | Tacit knowledge | Implicit knowledge | Explicit knowledge |
| Definition | Knowledge gained from personal experience and hard-to-articulate | Knowledge that’s not easily articulated but learned through experience | Tangible, codified information that’s easily documented and shared |
| Nature | Subjective, cognitive, and experimental learning | Informal, intuitive knowledge, and context-dependent | Objective, rational, and technical knowledge |
| Structure | Unstructured and context-sensitive | Less structured than explicit knowledge but more than tacit | Structured and organized, often documented in manuals/databases |
| Transferability | Difficult to transfer and relies on personal interaction and experience | Challenging to transfer and often shared through discussions or practice | Easily transferable through writing, diagrams, or databases |
| Examples | Skill-based tasks like driving a car, cooking, riding a bike, etc. | Sales intuition, body language interpretation, best practices at work, etc. | Documented information like user manuals, company policies, research reports, etc. |
| Documentation | Difficult to document | Not formally documented | Easily documented and stored in various formats |
🧠 Fun Fact: Michael Polanyi’s Personal Knowledge (1958) popularized the concept of tacit knowledge. He famously said, “We know more than we can tell,” emphasizing how much of our knowledge is intuitive or hard to articulate.
The Benefits of Capturing Tacit Knowledge
Think about this: A 2023 study found that small and medium-sized businesses could avoid costly disruptions by managing tacit knowledge more effectively. The result? Reduced knowledge loss and better performance—proof that even the smallest steps in knowledge management can lead to big outcomes
This highlights why capturing tacit knowledge, while challenging, is essential for boosting productivity, fostering innovation, and gaining a competitive edge.
Here’s how it helps. 💁
Increase in productivity and innovation
Capturing tacit knowledge empowers employees to address challenges quickly and efficiently. They can tap into their intuitive understanding and real-world experiences, helping them solve problems faster, reduce costs, and improve operational workflows.
Sharing deep, experience-based insights fuels creativity, inspiring fresh ideas and approaches that can set products and services apart in competitive markets.
It also fosters a collaborative culture among team members.
🧠 Fun Fact: Post-critical philosophy, championed by, once again, Michael Polanyi, highlights how all knowledge has a personal dimension. It challenges the idea that knowledge can be purely objective and celebrates the trust and intuition involved in how we understand the world.
Enhance knowledge capital and retention
Preserving institutional memory is vital for long-term success, especially as employees leave or retire. It ensures that valuable expertise and insights remain within the organization to safeguard operational continuity.
Making documented tacit knowledge accessible to teams helps them develop new skills and better tackle market challenges. This culture of knowledge-sharing also attracts top talent, showcasing a company’s commitment to professional growth.
Example: Picture a retiring HR manager with a wealth of unwritten insights on fostering employee satisfaction. Their mentorship program allows the company to retain these invaluable lessons, helping to maintain a positive work culture.
Plus, new hires can access these insights and best practices from seasoned colleagues to contribute to the organization better.
Differentiate your company in the market
Say you’re able to capture insights from experienced employees who excel in decision-making and customer service. This helps your company gain a competitive advantage. You can embed this knowledge into your processes to position your organization as a leader in innovation and customer satisfaction.
Tacit knowledge also contributes to an organizational culture of continuous learning. When employees recognize their experiences are valued, they are more likely to engage in ongoing professional development.
🧠 Fun Fact: Tacit knowledge has multiple names besides ‘tribal knowledge’. These include ‘experimental knowledge’ and ‘know-how knowledge’; they refer to the idea that sometimes you can’t explain how you know something.
Streamline and standardize: Use the Process and Procedures Template to document workflows, best practices, and lessons learned in an organized, shareable format, ensuring your team can easily access and build on valuable tacit knowledge.
How to Convert Tacit Knowledge Into Explicit Knowledge
Turning tacit knowledge into explicit knowledge involves transforming personal experience and intuitive expertise into tangible, shareable insights. Making it accessible across your organization fosters collaboration, innovation, and continuous learning among your teams.
It’s essential to build a culture that encourages documenting and sharing insights as if it were second nature. This means creating an environment where knowledge-sharing is embedded into daily operations.
Let’s look at some knowledge management strategies to capture and share tacit knowledge. 📃
Step #1: Audit and identify gaps in existing knowledge
Conduct a thorough review of your current knowledge base. Examine every piece of content for:
- Comprehensiveness: Does it fully explain the topics? Look for gaps and missed details
- Digestibility: Is the content easy to understand and apply? Think about how you can communicate information more effectively
- Applicability: Does the content empower users to take actionable steps toward expected outcomes? Analyze how your employees apply this information
Example: Imagine a retail store during the holiday rush. One of the experienced employees knows exactly how to rearrange items in the stockroom for faster access during peak hours, but they’ve never shared this process with others. By documenting their method, the store reduces restocking time by 10%, ensuring shelves stay full and customers leave satisfied.
Additionally, reflect on team feedback or performance metrics to identify areas for improvement. The goal is to pinpoint any knowledge or skill gaps that could benefit from documentation. You can also use knowledge base software to spot other weaknesses.
🔍 Did You Know? Monasteries during the Middle Ages acted as centers for knowledge management. Monks carefully copied and preserved texts, ensuring the survival of critical knowledge through centuries.
Step #2: Embed intentional learning in daily workflows
Tacit knowledge often gets overlooked because of its intangible nature. Capturing it is an intentional process, and learning opportunities should be embedded into daily workflows. Here are some ways:
- Mentorship and shadowing: Pair seasoned employees with new team members for hands-on learning. New employees will observe processes, perform tasks with guidance, and reflect on challenges together, creating a structured feedback loop
- Knowledge cafes: Facilitate group discussions on specific topics. Rotate team members between groups to share diverse perspectives. Use the final discussion to capture new insights and breakthroughs
- Communities for practice: Establish groups where employees can meet regularly to discuss challenges and brainstorm solutions. This informal approach encourages ongoing dialogue and a collaborative culture
Example: Imagine a tech startup where a senior developer pairs with a new hire. The senior guides them through debugging complex issues, passing on years of expertise in a single project cycle.
Step #3: Document lessons learned
Reflect regularly on lessons learned from projects and processes. Focus on capturing abstract skills, insights, and on-the-spot decisions that contributed to successes or highlighted areas for improvement.
Using wiki templates can work wonders to capture these details, which often contain the most valuable tacit knowledge to shape future strategies.
Example: Picture a marketing agency celebrating a wildly successful campaign. Using Docs, the team documents brainstorming techniques and split-testing strategies, ensuring these can be replicated for future campaigns.
🧠 Fun Fact: The wiki format, pioneered by Ward Cunningham in 1995, became a cornerstone of knowledge management. Wikipedia, the most famous example, has become the largest collaboratively created knowledge repository.
Step #4: Align teams with the organizational vision
To sustain a culture of continuous learning, ensure employees understand and align with your organization’s broader goals.
When teams recognize how their knowledge contributes to the bigger picture, they’re more likely to effectively identify, share, and document valuable tacit knowledge.
Step #5: Storytelling
Storytelling is one of the most effective knowledge transfer strategies. It elaborates on lessons learned and practical experiences, serving multiple purposes, such as:
- Improving retention since stories are inherently memorable with their relatable narratives that resonate emotionally
- Giving contextual insights that help others grasp the nuances of specific experiences, particularly in complex situations where direct explanations don’t suffice
- Enhancing engagement and participation through an environment in which employees feel comfortable contributing in
🔍 Did You Know? Launched in 2012, Google’s Knowledge Graph is a modern knowledge management tool that connects billions of facts and relationships to enhance search results. It’s a prime example of technology-driven knowledge sharing.
Tacit Knowledge and Knowledge Management
Tacit knowledge management enables organizations to capture, share, and utilize knowledge effectively. This ensures that critical information remains accessible and actionable across teams.
Here are some tools you can use for effective knowledge management. 👇
, the everything app for work, takes the hassle out of the documentation process! 🤩
It’s a versatile collaboration tool that streamlines workflows and organizes and captures data and insights. With Knowledge Management, the app becomes the perfect knowledge management system.
Let’s look at some of its features. 👀
Docs
Docs is an excellent cloud-based knowledge management software designed to create, organize, and manage documents while enabling seamless collaboration.
From drafting project blueprints and wikis to developing internal knowledge bases, Docs is ideal for teams aiming to consolidate their documentation workflows.
Subject matter experts can create best-practice repositories to detail workflows or decision-making processes. For example, a graphic designer might outline how they conceptualize branding, complete with linked tasks for asset creation and embedded reference visuals for easy access.
Best practices repository
You can document real-life examples shared during mentoring sessions.
For instance, a sales mentor might write a step-by-step guide in Docs about navigating complex client negotiations. They can also enrich it with embedded videos of role-playing sessions!
Real-time collaboration
It’s also a great way to brainstorm or conduct live problem-solving sessions.
Team members can co-create a document in real time, capturing the intricacies of the discussion. This ensures that tacit knowledge is preserved and contextualized within the team’s workflow.
Hierarchical structuring and searchability
You can use nested pages in Docs to categorize tacit knowledge based on department, project, or topic. For instance, a customer support team organizes tips for handling common issues under broader categories like ‘Billing Queries’ or ‘Technical Troubleshooting.’
Docs also offers a robust search functionality, ensuring that team members can quickly locate specific pieces of tacit knowledge, such as a troubleshooting step shared by an IT technician.
Brain
Brain is an AI-powered assistant within that connects tasks, documents, people, and organizational knowledge. During brainstorming sessions, team members can use Brain to draft real-time summaries of discussions, highlighting key takeaways and strategies experts share.
It also links related tasks, projects, and documents to a Doc, creating a centralized resource for team-specific knowledge.
Brain is also a great way to retrieve tacit knowledge in daily workflows. To get contextual answers, you just need to ask questions within the platform!
Its AI Writing Assistant functionality generates comprehensive templates for documenting expertise, provides grammar and tone suggestions, and creates visual aids like tables or checklists.
Knowledge Base Template
The Knowledge Base Template provides a well-structured framework for creating a digital information library to manage internal and external resources.
This free knowledge base template splits into sections for knowledge articles, FAQs, and other resources, enabling teams to organize and access critical information. It is beneficial for creating help centers and makes an excellent tool for improving customer support and internal knowledge sharing.
🧠 Fun Fact: Ancient civilizations like the Sumerians used clay tablets to manage knowledge, keeping records of trade, laws, and stories. These were some of the first attempts to store and share collective knowledge.
Ac‘knowledge’ Tacit Knowledge With
Tacit knowledge hides in plain sight—casual conversations, meetings, and breakroom discussions. It thrives in unrecorded moments and informal exchanges. However, it’s an invaluable resource that formal training can’t teach.
Platforms like make capturing, organizing, and sharing this hidden expertise easy.
With features like Docs, you can centralize key processes, document insights, and create a searchable knowledge base. Brain can help you generate content, refine ideas, and ensure your documentation is clear and impactful.
Ready to harness the power of your team’s tacit knowledge?
Sign up to for free today! ✅
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