How tacit knowledge drives innovation and team outcomes

Businesses hire employees because of their individual expertise. Technical skills help keep the machine going. However, employees with diverse talents, perspectives, and ideas give organizations a competitive edge.

Tacit knowledge outlines the unique hard and soft skills every person learns throughout their life, whether they’re aware of them or not. 

With the right tacit knowledge, employees help position businesses to perform and thrive. They need less time for training and become stronger communicators and leaders.

Unlike explicit knowledge, which you can document and share, tacit knowledge is subjective. It’s rooted in individual experiences, actions, perceptions, and values.

Polymath Michael Polanyi, author of The Art of Knowing, coined the term in the mid-20th century. He framed it as knowledge that can’t be fully articulated but is expressed through our natural human behaviors.

Tacit knowledge can emerge as innate soft skills, novel ideas, and intuitive insights. You may not be aware of having it, but it influences how you perform tasks, solve problems, and interact with others. This knowledge drives different types of innovation and competitive advantage. It enables you to bring your unique understanding to challenges.

Why is tacit knowledge valuable in the workplace?

In the workplace, your level of tacit knowledge and critical thinking skills are just as valuable as professional skills. Employers look beyond the documented office skills and certificates. They seek innovators and decision-makers to navigate complex situations. 

Your tacit skills fuel creativity in the workplace and enable innovation and knowledge-sharing. As you navigate daily challenges and prioritize tasks, this subtle yet powerful know-how sets you apart. Bringing together the tacit knowledge stores in a team empowers a company culture that celebrates learning and influences knowledge-sharing. It boosts adaptability and continuous improvement. Embracing tacit knowledge enriches business acumen. It’s a cornerstone for developing teams and building teamwork skills in your organization.

Team members with a wealth of tacit knowledge bring many benefits to teams and organizations: 

• Better decision-making skills
• Stronger innovation and creative thinking
• Problem-solving strategies based on experiential knowledge
• A culture of learning and knowledge-sharing
• Improved work performance and productivity
• Better team collaboration at work
• More personal development opportunities

Explicit, implicit, and tacit knowledge

People collect and share different types of personal knowledge throughout their lives. A person’s skills and talent development come through explicit and implicit knowledge and its application. 

Explicit knowledge is concrete and shareable. It applies to tangible facts and skills with rules and logic, like becoming a skilled data analyst or learning a coding language. You can record, store, and share explicit knowledge through content and asynchronous learning. You can use tools like textbooks, tutorials, wiki databases, videos, courses, how-to guides, or an employee handbook. 

Hard skills require explicit knowledge. You can learn explicit skills over time and improve with experience or peer learning. However, the learning process follows a more linear, step-by-step structure. For instance, you can document processes and data for new hires within your company’s knowledge management tools. This codification gives them resources to refer to when they have questions.

Unlike explicit knowledge, implicit knowledge comes through trial and error or personal, subjective experiences. The most critical skills for leaders and employees require implicit knowledge and innate understanding for high performance. 

Tacit knowledge is a form of knowledge you gain through repeated experiences and life circumstances. It drives your intangible skills and builds the intellectual capital in a company. For instance, you may be good at reading body language or have strong innate talents, such as an eye for design or a knack for different languages. 

How tacit knowledge is obtained?

From a young age, many parents focus on helping children become “well-rounded” people. They look for social, academic, and extracurricular opportunities for learning. What they’re typically after is tacit knowledge creation. 

Tacit knowledge comes from everywhere. You gain it through life experiences in childhood and adolescence. It’s also gained during higher education, career progression, and interactions. Healthy experiences can help you build resilience and become capable in different situations. 

Often, you’re not conscious of experiential learning as it happens. Looking back, you realize how far you’ve come and how your experiences have helped you develop your knowledge base. 

For example, working on a team project is an opportunity to learn to collaborate effectively. You pick up on nonverbal communication from your teammates, learn to negotiate over differences in approach, and adapt to your communication style. These observational learning, practice, and reflection opportunities build skills that enhance your big-picture thinking and capability. 

Why tacit knowledge is so hard to share

There are quite a few barriers to the transfer of tacit knowledge. Explicit knowledge and skills get documented for broad access, yet videos or books can’t capture the more innate skills. 

Even with a wealth of tacit knowledge in an organization, these barriers may keep you or a team member from sharing it: 

Difficulty of demonstration: You might struggle to articulate what you know. Often, tacit knowledge is so ingrained that you may have trouble putting your finger on it. For instance, an experienced lab tech may have excellent pipetting techniques. They’ve developed fine motor skills through practice. They can explain the mechanics of the activity, but a new learner will have to learn the “feel” of it. It can’t be taught.

Situational application: Sometimes, you’re only aware of the knowledge you possess once the situation calls for it. It makes proactively sharing information challenging. Apprenticeship is one way to share this knowledge. It allows a junior tradesperson to be “in the room” for situational leadership when tacit knowledge is likely to arise.

Lack of context: The nuances of new knowledge often require context-specific examples. Without shared experiences or a typical frame of reference, explaining your insights to others can feel tricky. Something always gets lost in translation. This is another area where apprenticeship or mentorship shines. Over time, you encounter situations where contextual knowledge surfaces.

Varied individual talent: Our talents and perceptions are individual to our experience. Where one person may have a keen number sense, another may excel in the language domain. Transferring knowledge between these domains may present challenges. In some cases, the person with specialized skills must take initiative and be the one to solve the problem.

Lack of time: Experience breeds competence. However, gaining experience through leadership often requires interaction, observation, and mentoring. Someone with deep knowledge to share may be so specialized in their role that they don’t have the time to share their tacit knowledge organically. Also, when leaders leave an organization, their tacit skills and institutional knowledge go, too. 

Examples of tacit knowledge in the workplace

Since tacit knowledge isn’t describable like explicit knowledge, it can be harder to grasp. Here are some more tacit knowledge examples to consider:

• Humor: Humor is intuitive, and laughter often relies on social cues and norms that don’t come from a textbook. A little laughter brings lightheartedness to stressful moments and can ease monotonous work tasks. 

• Language: Learning a new language requires a mixture of explicit and implicit knowledge. Grammar, vocabulary, and syntax are explicit knowledge. Contextual and abstract language understanding is tacit.

• Intuition: Trusting your gut, or using intuition, means following your body’s response to a situation or decision. Although it isn’t an exact science (your gut isn’t always right), your instinct can assist in personal and professional decisions. 

• Leadership: Organizations see big rewards for investing in leadership training, up to $7 ROI for every dollar invested. However, leadership development programs aren’t always successful. This is because tacit skills are not documented or taught. These include soft skills like active listening and emotional intelligence. Leadership values like patience, empathy, and resilience similarly exist within tacit knowledge.

How to promote tacit knowledge in the workplace

Tacit knowledge is difficult to share directly. However, knowledge management methods allow teams to benefit from the collective knowledge. Use these guidelines to build a culture that provides sharing and learning opportunities.

Create a knowledge-sharing and collaboration culture

Value and encourage open and effective communication in the environment you build. This culture could include regular team meetings that promote social learning, brainstorming sessions. Stand-ups are another useful option for teams to share ideas and insights. This also includes retrospectives to discuss what did and didn’t work on a project. 

These types of meetings provide an opportunity to offer solutions and share perspectives. Learning from failure is just as important as learning from success. Learning from and sharing mistakes (and fixes) with your team is another form of sharing tacit learning. This collaborative culture leads to open discussions and continuous improvement. 

Using the SECI model in team knowledge management

The Socialization, Externalization, Combination, and Internalization (SECI) model, also known as the Nonaka Takeuchi Knowledge Spiral, is used in knowledge management. It explains how information is transferred within an organization. SECI outlines four modes of knowledge conversion: 

• Socialization is sharing tacit knowledge through direct interaction, such as conversations and shared experiences.
• Externalization is articulating tacit knowledge into explicit concepts through dialogue, metaphors, and written documents.
• Combination is the process of integrating various explicit knowledge pieces, creating systematic sets of information accessible organization-wide.
• Internalization is the learning and application of explicit knowledge, transforming it into tacit knowledge through experience and practice.

These four steps enable the transformation of tacit knowledge into explicit knowledge.

Motivating your team through cross-departmental projects allows members to apply their tacit knowledge. It’s also another opportunity for others to benefit from social learning. 

As part of this encouragement, recognize and reward team members who contribute and collaborate. Employee recognition increases collaboration and spurs the flow of ideas and information.

Empower teams to share processes

When you share your processes, you’re not just passing on instructions. You’re also transferring wisdom and insights that can’t be captured in manuals or guides. 

Tacit knowledge-sharing can have a positive influence on innovation. It also provides a foundation for continuous improvement, so knowledge evolves from the collective team experience. 

Eliminate social silos in the workplace

Information silos restrict the flow of institutional knowledge within an organization. These silos, often structured around teams, keep information locked up, leading to knowledge gaps.

Although most people think of data silos as a digital issue, you can also break down silos through information sharing. This could include regular interdepartmental meetups, planned days for discussion, or all-hands meetings. You can also plan your organizational structure to improve the free flow of information. This naturally breaks down silos that form in more compartmentalized environments.

Start mentoring programs

Mentorship programs are a great way for employees to benefit from the informal knowledge leaders acquire on the job. It accelerates learning and development while fostering a culture of mutual support. 

Build a simple process that lets your team members harness the benefits of mentorship. Identify more experienced employees who could mentor based on expertise and leadership characteristics. Pair them with mentees who want to grow in specific areas and would benefit from guidance. 

Schedule regular check-ins and encourage informal meetings. Regular meetings and check-ins allow for a natural exchange of insights and experience not found in manuals or guides.

Give your mentors the support they need to thrive. This could be providing the right tools or leadership coaching. Provide resources on how to be a mentor, and consider reverse mentoring programs. These allow younger members to share skills a senior leader may lack. For instance, a younger mentor may share new techniques or digital workplace skills they’ve acquired organically with a leader who didn’t have the same access.

Build and share your tacit knowledge with coaching

Tacit knowledge forms the basis of many of your unique and marketable skills. Despite its difficulty in defining or sharing, it remains a valuable asset for an organization. Bringing together diverse teams can promote knowledge transfer and build a strong culture.

A personal coach can help you explore your own tacit knowledge and how it could enhance your personal and professional life. They can help you think about your life experience and turn it into stronger applicable skills. Learn how a BetterUp Coach can help you discover your tacit knowledge.