Tacit knowledge

Last week, I wrote ​a tweet​ on the importance of tacit knowledge: the knowledge, skills, and abilities an individual gains through experience that are often difficult to put into words or otherwise communicate. It said:

"For all the talk about equal outcomes in education, there is an absolute lack of attention to the importance of transmitting tacit knowledge. Unless teachers improve at transmitting tacit knowledge, life outcomes will disproportionally depend on having parents who can."

A reader commented that tacit knowledge is much harder to transmit than explicit knowledge. I agree, of course (after all, we define tacit knowledge precisely as what's harder to put into words). However, and this is the key point, hile it's true that tacit knowledge is hard to transmit, we're also making it harder than necessary because we insist on transmitting it abstractly rather than with concrete, commented examples.

I see this in college, which fails to transmit tacit knowledge precisely because there's a self-imposed constraint to focus the curriculum on what can be easily written in textbooks or slides, ignoring the rest. I also see this in corporate environments, where companies that rely excessively on an HR department tend to restrict training to what can be easily written in slides or taught to professional trainers with no operational experience.

But let's get to the point. How do you transmit tacit knowledge?

My solution is as follows. When I lecture at the university, I don't just teach principles; I also walk students through common situations they will encounter at work: "A common scenario you'll face in this job is this… What would you do? That's good, because… That's not a great idea, because… what I would do is…"

There's nothing better than going through a common work-related scenario to teach tacit knowledge. Do not lead with theory; doing so is paralyzing, will make you less comprehensible and relevant, and, most importantly, will mislead you into selecting the concepts that are easier to express abstractly and neglecting the rest. Conversely, lead with concrete situations. That will help you focus on judgment calls and other concepts that are hard to explain abstractly but easy to discuss when related to a real-world situation.