How can the invisible be seen? - Chapter 3

What is tacid knowledge?

Tacit knowledge (as opposed to formal, codified or explicit knowledge) is the kind of knowledge that is difficult to transfer to another person by means of writing it down or verbalizing it.

Explicit knowledge is easy to write down, easy to communicate, easy to teach, and easy to learn. Explicit knowledge are rules and facts. Tacit knowledge is being able to do things without being able to explain how. We can’t learn tacit knowledge from a textbook. We know more than we tell.

Tacit knowledge plays a prominent party in our ability to cope with complex conditions. Every day we entrust our lives to our tacit knowledge. We rely on tacit knowledge to carry out rules, to interpret facts, to judge their credibility, to fit them together, and to judge what counts as a relevant fact in the first place. Tacit knowledge isn’t just about actions like making a left turn or riding a bicycle. In trying to convince us that the world is simple and responsive to rules and procedures, the claims either dismiss tacit knowledge or encourage us to distrust it.

Tacit knowledge is the basis for our skills and the reflection of our experience. When we move to complex situations in which success depends on tacit knowledge, the claims become less trustworthy. Explicit knowledge is import, but isn’t the entire story. Tacit knowledge: We don’t notice it and we can’t easily describe it.

Expertise depends heavily on tacit knowledge, as do many of our everyday skills. Some procedures can be carried out directly, as when we follow the steps in a checklist. But other depend on tacit knowledge to adapt a given procedure to fit the circumstances.

Explicit knowledge:

• Declarative information

• Routines & Procedures

Tacit knowledge:

• Perceptual skills

• Workarounds

• Pattern matching

• Judging typicality

• Mental models

To make tacit knowledge more visible, we’re going to describe different aspects of it.

What are perceptual skills?

With experience we learn to see things that others don’t notice. With experience we learn where to look as well as how to make discriminations and recognize connections. We learn to direct our attention. Skilled performance depends on the way we look and listen. It depends on what we can notice and on what kinds of discriminations we can make.

What are adapting procedures?

Procedures are typically just a series of if-then rules. In following procedures, we perform each step until we reach the criterion that tells us we have finished that step and should start the next one. When we see these steps and the cues and criteria for starting and completing each step, the process looks straightforward. The challenge lies in judging whether the criteria have been met.

Knowing how to violate the procedures is a type of tacit knowledge. Skilled performance depends on the kinds of perceptual discrimination we can make and on how we interpret, modify and replace the standard procedures when they don’t work. But there is more to expertise than that. Therefore tacit knowledge is so important!

How does pattern matching work?

Every type of expert has built up a repertoire of patterns to quickly make sense of what is happening. These patterns aren’t facts, or rules, or procedures. They are based n all the experiences and events the experts have lived through and heard about. They are the basis of intuitions. The patterns let us judge what category of situation we are facing.

Sometimes it takes special talent to describe tacit knowledge, because people have difficulty articulating it. Expertise depends on perceptual discriminations, the ability to go beyond standard procedures, and pattern matching.

What is meant by typicality and anomaly?

Anomaly = deviation. We draw on dozens and hundreds of experiences to sense when something seems familiar, or to pick up anomalies. The interplay between noticing typical cases and anomalous ones is a type of tacit knowledge found in many fields. For example: Nurses in Intensive care units build up a sense of typicality that lets them notice what a patient looks atypical. The nurses become early warning systems to catch weak signals that a patient is starting to deteriorate.

What are mental models?

Mental models are the stories we construct to understand how things work. They mirror the events or system they are modeling, but they capture only a limited aspect of those events or that system. We form our mental models from the way we understand causes. Mental models are even essential for manual work but even more critical for other types of work, such as weather forecasting, intelligence analysis, and military command and control, in which success depends entirely on cognitive function and not on manual strength or dexterity.

It is hard to give people feedback about tacit knowledge. Because tacit knowledge is tacit, we struggle to describe it. For everyone it is very difficult to show and say the quality of perceptual skills, mental models, or ability to recognize typicality.

When we try to improve our performance we usually emphasize explicit knowledge more than tacit knowledge. In giving feedback, we tend to focus on specific procedures. There are techniques, such as Cognitive Task Analysis, that are specifically designed to capture tacit knowledge.

Tacit knowledge is critical for the way we design and use procedures in complex situations.

Tacit knowledge (as opposed to formal, codified or explicit knowledge) is the kind of knowledge that is difficult to transfer to another person by means of writing it down or verbalizing it.

Explicit knowledge is easy to write down, easy to communicate, easy to teach, and easy to learn. Explicit knowledge are rules and facts. Tacit knowledge is being able to do things without being able to explain how. We can’t learn tacit knowledge from a textbook. We know more than we tell.