Epic Think Tank
Blending Learning and Knowledge Management
2. Making the tacit explicit
A distinction is commonly made in KM circles between tacit
and explicit knowledge. Explicit knowledge is everything
that is written down or otherwise encoded within an organisation's
documents, systems and processes. Tacit knowledge, by contrast,
exists largely in employee's heads.
Since the invention of writing, back in the dawn of time, organisations
have had more or less effective systems for dealing with their explicit
knowledge. In historical times we had the company library, and more
recently still, document management systems. But it is the far more
elusive entity of tacit knowledge that is the focus of much of the
heat in 'KM' currently.
One particularly tantalising question is how amenable this form
of knowledge might be to systems designed for handling explicit
knowledge.
Such a system is the following widely-used model for the activities
that make up knowledge management:
- Identifying
- Gathering
- Refining
- Re-using
In the case of tacit knowledge, one would have to assume that somewhere
between step two and step three, the tacit stuff undergoes some
form of conversion process that transforms it into the explicit
variety - i.e. it gets written down, or in some other way codified.
But surely there's a paradox here. If we strip knowledge of its
personal dimension - if we take it out of the heads of our people
and put it into a database - are we not converting it back into
mere information? And does it not lose something vital in the process?
The problem is that information does not magically reconvert itself
back into knowledge once it enters a new head. Terms like 'knowledge
capture' make the process of transcribing tacit knowledge seem seductively
straightforward, whereas in actual fact it is fraught with all sorts
of difficulties.
Which leads us to pose the first really challenging question that
this discussion threw up: what if certain types of knowledge really
can't be separated from the context in which the knowledge exists
- from either the head within which the knowledge reposes or from
the situation that originally formed it?
Next>>
Intro: Sven, VBM and the book under
the counter
1. The personality of knowledge
2. Learning from war stories
3. The book under the counter
4. The convergence of learning and
knowledge management
5. Reward systems in the culture club
6. Modelling the tall poppy
7. Value based management and Sven's
men
8. The Odyssey as quality manual
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