Every organization runs on tacit knowledge—the unwritten understanding that experienced employees carry in their heads. This knowledge is invaluable. It's also invisible, fragile, and increasingly at risk.
What Is Tacit Knowledge?
Tacit knowledge is the opposite of explicit knowledge. Explicit knowledge can be written down, documented, and shared through formal channels. Tacit knowledge can't.
Examples of tacit knowledge in organizations:
- Knowing which approvals are really required vs. which are formalities
- Understanding the unwritten rules of how decisions actually get made
- Recognizing which customer complaints signal real problems vs. noise
- Knowing the workarounds that make broken processes function
This knowledge is acquired through experience, observation, and informal learning. It's essential for operations but nearly impossible to capture through traditional documentation.
The Risk
Tacit knowledge creates three serious risks:
1. Key Person Dependency
When critical tacit knowledge exists in only one or two people, you're one resignation away from operational crisis. The knowledge walks out the door with the person.
2. Onboarding Friction
New employees struggle to become effective because they lack the tacit knowledge their predecessors accumulated. They have to learn through trial and error—or depend on others who are too busy to teach.
3. Change Blindness
Because tacit knowledge is invisible, organizations often don't realize how much they depend on it. Process changes, tool implementations, and reorganizations fail because they didn't account for the tacit knowledge that made things work.
Why Traditional Approaches Fail
Organizations have tried various approaches to capture tacit knowledge:
- Documentation projects: Produce static documents that are incomplete by design (tacit knowledge is what people don't realize they know) and outdated within months
- Knowledge management systems: Create repositories nobody uses because they're hard to navigate and never quite relevant
- Mentorship programs: Help but don't scale, and depend on senior employees having time they don't have
The fundamental problem is that tacit knowledge doesn't transfer well through traditional channels. It's contextual, situational, and often unconscious.
A Different Approach
What if you could extract tacit knowledge through natural conversation?
AI-powered interviews can surface tacit knowledge that traditional approaches miss:
- Contextual questions: Unlike forms or templates, conversation can follow the thread of how work actually happens
- Non-judgmental capture: People share more when they're not worried about documentation being "correct"
- Automatic extraction: AI can identify patterns and insights that humans might miss
- Continuous updates: Regular conversations capture evolution over time
The goal isn't to replace human expertise—it's to capture and preserve the knowledge that makes your organization function.
Building Organizational Memory
When you systematically capture tacit knowledge, you build something powerful: organizational memory that outlasts any individual.
New employees can learn from the accumulated understanding of their predecessors. Teams can access insights from across the organization. Leaders can make decisions informed by operational reality.
This isn't about replacing human judgment. It's about giving humans access to the collective knowledge of the organization.
Starting the Conversation
The first step is acknowledging that tacit knowledge exists and matters. The second is finding ways to surface and preserve it.
Your most valuable operational knowledge is probably locked in people's heads right now. The question is: what are you doing about it?
