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> Pretty much all knowledge can be "expressed", whether
> in words, pictures, or by means of hands-on demonstrations. One thing the
> literature on knowledge management systems shows is that tacit
> knowledge is
> _rarely_ inexpressible; most often, it just requires someone to ask the
> right questions ("why are you doing that?", "can you show me that
> again so I
> can see what you're doing?").
I know how to walk. The use of the word "know" here is important, because we
do use the word "know" in this sense all the time. It is clearly different
in some sense from the meaning of "know" in the sentence "I know what time
it is." But we still call it knowing.
Physiologists now have a pretty good understanding of the physiology of
walking. They know how walking works and how we do it. But none of us learn
how to walk by reading physiology textbooks. Perhaps an elite athlete may be
able to eek out a improvement in performance based on the knowledge gained
by the study of the physiology of walking, but most of us are not going to
walk any better whether we study physiology or not.
Is my knowledge of how to walk simply the unexpressed equivalent of the
physiologist's knowledge of how people walk? If it is, then a competent
knowledge engineer or technical writer should be able to elicit the
physiology of walking by interviewing me and asking the right questions.
Somehow I doubt it.
Experience suggests that what I mean when I say that I "know" how to walk is
distinct from what the physiologist means when he says he "knows" how I
walk. My knowledge of walking is tacit: I cannot tell my child how to walk.
All I can do is hold his hand until he stops falling on his butt.
The two-year-old's knowledge of walking and the physiologist's knowledge of
walking, though they share a common object, are two different kinds of
knowledge. You cannot get one kind from the other kind, in either direction.
And the same is true of many other areas of human performance.
---
Mark Baker
Stilo Corporation
1900 City Park Drive, Suite 504 , Ottawa, Ontario, Canada, K1J 1A3
Phone: 613-745-4242, Fax: 613-745-5560
Email mbaker -at- ca -dot- stilo -dot- com
Web: http://www.stilo.com
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