The Tacit Knowledge Bottleneck
The most valuable knowledge in any organization is often the hardest to capture, because the people who have it can't fully explain it.
The Articulation Gap
Ask experts how they make decisions and you’ll typically get an incomplete picture. They’ll describe the factors they consciously consider. What they often can’t articulate: the pattern recognition that happens below conscious awareness.
Experts know things they can’t fully articulate. That tacit knowledge is often their most valuable contribution, and the hardest to capture.
The AI Training Problem
AI systems learn from data. If knowledge isn’t captured in data, models can’t learn it. Tacit knowledge, by definition, isn’t in the data. It’s in the experts who create and interpret the data.
More Promising Approaches
Decision logging: Capture not just outcomes but the specific inputs that led to them.
Structured disagreement: When experts disagree, exploring why often surfaces tacit criteria neither would articulate unprompted.
Schema co-creation: Building data models with experts forces articulation of what entities and relationships matter.
The Takeaway: Tacit knowledge is real and valuable. Capturing it requires methods designed for knowledge that resists articulation.