Tacit knowledge - Topics

SOPs keep a plant running at 3 a.m. with whoever is on shift — and that reliability is exactly the ceiling of codified knowledge The typist who hits 90 words a minute but cannot name the keys under their fingers: procedural knowledge runs without narration The manual documents the explicit half of the job and quietly misses the other half The body knows things words can't carry — dance as embodied understanding Jazz improvisation as knowledge that lives in the hands instead of words Muscle memory is a misnomer — the memory sits in your basal ganglia and that is why explaining how you ride a bike is so hard Wikipedia is the largest explicit knowledge base ever built yet most of what your company runs on lives in chat threads and heads Why apprenticeships beat classrooms for skills that live in the hands Veteran drivers cannot fully verbalize what their hands and feet do at a hill start: skill outruns speech Losing the wiki is annoying; losing the person who wrote it is a different class of disaster How crafts survive when nothing about them is ever written down The paradox of procedural knowledge: the better you are the less you can say about how What belongs in a runbook and what never will — drawing the boundary of the codifiable is a management problem and not a writing problem Communities of practice exist precisely because tacit knowledge moves only through participation and shared work Knowledge management systems keep failing for the same reason: they try to capture what was never articulable in the first place Nonaka's SECI model maps the round trip: tacit insight gets externalized into documents and re-internalized through practice Version-controlled documentation is an attempt to make organizational knowledge survive employee turnover The world's best recipe will not make you a good cook: the feel of the dough and the smell at the right moment were never in the text The curse of knowledge: experts make the worst teachers because automatic steps no longer get narrated Interviews hire for what candidates can state; six months later performance was decided by everything unstated Apprenticeship survives the internet age because some things transfer only by standing next to someone doing the work The best mentorship is not advice — it is watching how someone decides what to ignore AI trained on documents inherits everything written and none of the feel: Polanyi's paradox is now a scaling problem What artists know that theory cannot say A sommelier can name the notes but the nose itself took years and nobody can download it Polanyi's line still stings: we know more than we can tell The Dreyfus model explains why novices need rules and experts bend them — and why experts struggle to teach what they now do automatically Expert intuition is pattern recognition built from thousands of reviewed cases: the chess master's one-second glance Tacit knowledge explains why outsourcing a decade-old function often costs more than it saves An expert's three-second judgment often outperforms a committee's week of analysis and explaining why is the hard part In aviation they call it airmanship — judgment built only inside the cockpit that no checklist fully captures Common sense is practical knowledge that never got written down and mostly does not need to be