“Tacit knowledge is knowledge that cannot be captured through words alone. - Cedric Chin
How do you teach tacit knowledge?
- More about culminating the correct feeling of an action.
- Emulation, action, exercise You learn by copying at first, until you internalize the principles behind the actions.
Ok, that’s cool for physical things, but what about knowledge work? I’d argue that the same principal applies. The aura of tacit knowledge shows up at work all the time when you talk to someone with experience. It pokes its head out when you ask a senior (insert title here) to take a look at a difficult problem you’re working on, and they almost instantaneously know whether something is a good or bad idea. Or when something doesn’t look right, but they can’t quite explain why. It’s something that they don’t even know how to convey themselves, but they trust it and oftentimes it turns out to be right. It’s part intuition, part hidden principles that have revealed themselves over thousands of reps.
I have a coworker who is one of the best traders I know. He has these amazing calls and frequently will outperform when the rest of the firm is underperforming. And yet, if you were to ask him directly what he’s looking at or why he makes certain decisions, he wouldn’t be able to tell you. Not that he’s not willing, but I believe it’s that he can’t. He himself doesn’t know what complex math goes on in his head to come to come to a decision. That’s tacit knowledge.
For more reading on the topic: Cedric Chin has a good post on Commoncog Why Tacit Knowledge is More Important than Deliberate Practice