Tacit Knowledge

The Seeds of Misunderstanding

In Nonaka and Takeuchi's model of organizational knowledge creation, tacit knowledge comprises inchoate ideas that are converted into “explicit knowledge” in the form of words or numbers that anyone can understand. Thus, the inexpressible thoughts of an individual, which are subjective and personal, constitute the tacit input to a process that produces explicit outputs, which are assumed capable of universal comprehension: anyone can understand the intended meaning of explicit knowledge. Even the tacit understanding of enigmatic processes, such as knowledge creation in Japanese companies, can be rendered “universal.”

Amid Western expectations that management science should be “as scientific as possible,” many Westerners interpreted Nonaka and Takeuchi's concept of tacit-explicit knowledge conversion as a way of capturing an important dimension of organizational knowledge that might be overlooked in “objective” accounts of an organization's resources and capabilities. This concern with “hidden” knowledge fueled the Western penchant for knowledge management (KM), where tacit knowledge is “captured” by converting it into explicit knowledge that can be “managed.” Given the generally positive connotations of the word knowledge (few people would want to make a public display of being in favor of ignorance), it has often been possible for advocates of KM to gloss over philosophical concerns about what they meant by knowledge. Accordingly, an uncritical acceptance of the alleged virtues of explicit knowledge might have benefited from a tendency to assume that it was in some way similar to objective knowledge, associated with positivistic assumptions about a “true” understanding of a real external world “out there.”

Yet, Nonaka and his colleagues insist that truth, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder. By implication, truth is purely a matter of emotional preference: a personal opinion “in here” (i.e., in the head of the knower). Unless we can claim to know the mind of another person, it is impossible to know whether what that person says (a manifestation of explicit knowledge) is indeed his or her “true” opinion. Explicit knowledge can be whatever people choose to articulate in the name of whatever they hold to be true. Thus, assessing the value of explicit knowledge involves a judgment about the nature and reliability of its source. Sometimes, the source can be regarded as unimpeachable. Members of close-knit groups might trust each other to appreciate truth or beauty in an aligned way. Conversely, such alignment is less likely when people encounter strangers who are accustomed to different ways of acting and thinking.

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