Can we capture Tacit knowledge?

[Naguib]

People in the organization are busy with managing all the information that are available- files, reports, process flows. They spend most of their time for building a good knowledge repository. But Knowledge management involves managing both explicit and tacit knowledge.

My question is- how to collect, store and share those tacit knowledge? Can tacit knowledge be captured? Do organizations really focus on managing Tacit knowledge?- if not, can we say, they are doing KM?


- Naguib
www.kmtalk.net - First Malaysian KM site

[Euan]

IMHO one of the few ways to make knowledge more accessible is to enable more conversations to take place in online environments such as forums, weblogs and wikis. In this way sharing is easier and more accessible than by more formalised processes and by making these conversations "linky" people can navigate them, point to the good stuff and build up a collective memory of what was useful. When you then add in user tagging and RSS feeds which persist once people have moved on you have as close as you are going to get to those dreadful words "knowledge capture".

[Alan]

Naguib,

  I believe that such knowledge can be captured - but it has to be done as a dedicated task - which takes resources and time.  I would also note that I have never seen a dedicated effort, only dribs and drabs, to capture such knowledge!

Euan raises some good tools to try and capture this information ... - again resources and time is required to make the most of the information that has been netted.

Importantly, proper planning by the organisation is needed - who is going to capture the knowledge, who is going to sift through the information, when will this be done (on entry, on exit, annually, monthly, on occurrence)?

Cheers,

Alan

[Liz Chan]

Though tacit knowledge is elusive, and difficult to tap as it is socially embedded in the individual, my views is that it can be shared through interaction and cooperation amongst individuals. 

For this to happen, trust, communication and interpersonal skills as well as mutual commitment are essential.  Besides, a socially cohesive environment is necessary for the learning process to take place.

Have a Nice Day!
Liz Chan

[Liz Chan]

Hi Alan
From my readings of various journal articles and literature, absorptive capacity (Levinthal & Cohen, Zahra George) was identified as an important component of the transfer of knowledge on the part of the receiver.

However, I believe that absorptive capacity is necessary on both the
transferor and the receiver as well.  Comments appreciated from any members.

Cheers!
Liz

[garpet]

Naguib,

I believe that such knowledge can be captured - but it has to be done as a dedicated task - which takes resources and time.  I would also note that I have never seen a dedicated effort, only dribs and drabs, to capture such knowledge!

Alan

I am afraid that I am one of those who have to support the argument that capturing knowledge is resource intensive. In organisations these days where there is such an emphasis on "doing more with less" there is often no incentive to find and spend money on actually achieving this.

It is quite strange in fact how little effort is spent in collecting, preserving, indexing and making available information.

What is of course done, with great abandon, in my experience, is simply spewing information into the ether and hoping that somehow it will be captured, collected, stored, indexed and in some way capable of being made available and useful. More correctly there is the spewing of information into the ether with little care given about all the other items.

I know that once something has been lodged on a web site or has been written in an email there are very few people who actually want to store the content. In this way they can spend some more days of their lives at some point 'rediscovering' what they have already done and - yep you guessed it - doing it again.

What a waste!

[Rajeev]

Naguib,
I think its worth look at this URL,
http://www.knowledgeboard.com/cgi-bin/item.cgi?id=1532

I my opinion there is no stratight answer (Story telling , COPs, informal groups, pantry talks can be useful)  for your question, different methodologies need to use for different business environment, culture etc.
cheers!
Rajeev

[Colin]

IMHO to some degree it can be not so much captured as identified, the key is not then storing or indexing it but developing means to get at the tacit knowledge when needed and probably more importantly than indexing it contextualising it, ie when was it created and by whom and for who. Conversations etc go a long way to achieving this. I am afraid I am one of those in favour of not so much spewing information into the ether but making everything available and then developing the means of searching through it which is becoming increasingly easy.

[ashwinisu]

Hi,

Has any kind of research/study been done in this field?
I find this topic very interesting .... plan to investigate it further

[Liz Chan]

Hi Naguib
I was wondering do we really need all tacit knowledge to be made explicit? Having a knowledge repository does not mean one has all the knowledge captured in the database unless it is retrieved, used and improved upon.

[agibbons]

I'm not sure it's correct to say that 'there is tacit knowledge and explicit knowledge'. More accurately. knowledge has tacit and explict components.

knowledge management efforts that attempt to separate out one from the other, or attempt to 'convert' one to another, have a very difficult time ahead of them.


(my $0.02 ...)


Alistair

[Greg]

That's a good answer Alistair. It makes more sense to me than the perhaps reductionist approach of splitting knowledge up. From this stance, some aspects of knowledge can be captured, and some can't.

I say this because the concept of capturing so called 'tacit knowledge' appears to be erroneous, as pointed out by Prof. TD Wilson in his article 'The nonsense of knowledge management' http://informationr.net/ir/8-1/paper144.html

The idea that 'tacit knowledge' could be captured appears to have formed from a misunderstanding of Polanyi's original work in describing tacit knowledge. "...'tacit' means 'hidden', tacit knowledge is hidden knowledge, hidden even from the consciousness of the knower. " (Wilson, 2002, http://informationr.net/ir/8-1/paper144.html).

I think using Alistair's idea we can attempt to work with knowledge, concentrating on knowledge that can be expressed, and knowing that some aspects of it will be hidden from us, and therefore difficult to capture.

[Jim Brander]

Naguib

Can I rephrase your question to - Can we capture explicit knowledge?

Your question mentions capturing files, reports, process flows and then a knowledge repository. A library full of books is also a knowledge repository, but knowledge isn't captured. The person who wrote the book had knowledge, and the person who reads the book can gain knowledge - the book serves as a transmission device for knowledge. We can say a book contains knowledge, but that is only because we can transform the static words into the dynamic structure in our heads we call knowledge. A book can contain a great deal of implicit knowledge - a description of something uses terms that are relevant, and doesn't use terms that are not relevant, so by reading the explicit material and thinking about what it means, we also learn what is implicitly left out.
Much of tacit knowledge is tacit only because we lack the tools to describe it - take a simple equation like

A + B = C

When you read that, you assume it is on a logical surface, and that logical surface makes the equals sign true. You were never taught to recognise that - it is tacit, as is much else we teach people, because we don't know how to tell them directly, so we show them what to do and rely on their knowledge converter being very similar to ours.

The answer to your question - we already capture a great deal of tacit knowledge, it is just that we don't know we have captured it - we can't recognise it. But someone reads what we know we have captured - the files, the reports - and they are forced to acquire the tacit knowledge in the act of recreating the explicit knowledge in their heads - otherwise it wouldn't make sense. That doesn't mean we can't capture more tacit knowledge, by understanding it, but then it ceases to be tacit.