We Know More Than We Can Say: The Paradox of Tacit Knowledge - Part One

By Nancy Dixon. “We know more than we can say” is a popular phrase heard at KM conferences and quoted in the many KM blogs. It is quoted to encourage attending to tacit knowledge, rather than exclusively focusing on explicit knowledge.  But those quoting the phrase seldom go beyond referencing it to Polanyi, providing little explanation or reasoning for why, if we know it, we can’t just write it down.
In this post I want to offer the “why” behind the phrase and give some examples. The answer lies in, 1) how our brains store knowledge, 2) how we create knowledge, and 3) the values and relationships that are interlinked with tacit knowledge.
How Our Brains Store Knowledge  What we learn from experience is stored, not in the form of answers, but in bits and pieces of the experience we have accumulated, sometimes over years. What we think of as tacit knowledge is really the human ability to draw on our past experiences to respond to new problems or questions.
When a colleague asks a question, the responder pulls together the bits and pieces from different parts of past experience to construct an answer. The operant word in that sentence is “construct.”  The responder constructs an answer in the moment of responding. Responders do not “know” the response they will give until faced with the need for it. Karl Weick, the well-known organizational theorist, affirms this idea when he says, “How do I know what I think until I hear what I say?” Read more...