Tacit Knowledge - Knowledge Management

Knowledge Management

According to Parsaye, there are three major approaches to the capture of tacit knowledge from groups and individuals. They are:

• Interviewing experts.
• Learning by being told.
• Learning by observation.

Interviewing experts can be done in the form of structured interviewing or by recording organizational stories. Structured interviewing of experts in a particular subject is the most commonly used technique to capture pertinent, tacit knowledge. An example of a structured interview would be an exit interview. Learning by being told can be done by interviewing or by task analysis. Either way, an expert teaches the novice the processes of a task. Task analysis is the process of determining the actual task or policy by breaking it down and analyzing what needs to be done to complete the task. Learning by observation can be done by presenting the expert with a sample problem, scenario, or case study and then observing the process used to solve the problem.

Some other techniques for capturing tacit knowledge are:

• Action learning

All of these approaches should be recorded in order to transfer the tacit knowledge into reusable explicit knowledge.

Professor Ikujiro Nonaka has proposed the SECI (Socialization, Externalization, Combination, Internalization) model, one of the most widely cited theories in knowledge management, to present the spiraling knowledge processes of interaction between explicit knowledge and tacit knowledge (Nonaka & Takeuchi 1995).

• The IRG Solution - hierarchical incompetence and how to overcome it argued that tacit knowledge was essentially a property of social networks and that much tacit knowledge was held in, and communicated by this informal lateral communication between network members.