Tacit vs. Explicit Knowledge: What Every Organization Needs to Understand

2025-09-24

Executive Summary

• Not all knowledge can be written down and stored. Tacit knowledge lives in individual experience and skill — difficult or impossible to fully convert into text.
• Most organizations only have a strategy for explicit knowledge (documents, SOPs). Tacit knowledge — often the more valuable type — has no clear strategy.
• Understanding the distinction helps organizations ask the right questions: which knowledge needs documentation? Which requires a different approach? Which is at highest risk when staff change?
• The goal isn’t to document everything — it’s to manage each type of knowledge in ways that fit its nature.

Why you can’t learn to ride a bicycle from a manual

Write a complete set of instructions that would allow someone who has never ridden a bicycle to learn purely from the document, with no direct guidance.

Nearly impossible — even if the document is thorough: hand position, balance mechanics, pedaling rhythm, where to look. After reading it and getting on the bicycle, the person will still fall. Because there’s something the text can’t transmit: the felt sense of balance, the immediate reflexive adjustments, the knowing that the body accumulates through practice.

This is the simplest example of tacit knowledge — and why it matters in organizations.

Explicit knowledge — the type organizations already know how to manage

Explicit knowledge is knowledge that can be expressed, recorded, and transmitted through language, text, or diagrams.

In manufacturing, explicit knowledge includes:

• Standard operating procedures
• Product specifications
• Quality inspection criteria
• Approved supplier lists
• Safety regulations
• Production schedules and maintenance plans

This is the type of knowledge that most document management systems and quality management systems are designed to handle. ISO requires documentation of explicit knowledge. Audits check explicit knowledge. Training programs transmit explicit knowledge.

Explicit knowledge has one defining characteristic: it can exist independently of the person who created it. When an employee writes an SOP and then leaves, the SOP remains.

Tacit knowledge — the type most organizations have no clear strategy for

Tacit knowledge is knowledge that lives in the experience, skill, and judgment of an individual — what they “know” but cannot fully express in writing.

Michael Polanyi described it simply: “We know more than we can tell.”

In manufacturing, tacit knowledge includes:

Judgment from operational experience. A long-tenured machine operator knows the sound of the equipment and can distinguish normal operating sounds from the sounds that precede a fault — before any monitoring instrument detects anything. This cannot be written into a procedure.

Sensory assessment skill. An experienced quality inspector can evaluate incoming raw materials by color, smell, texture — judgment accumulated over years of exposure to good and substandard materials. Some criteria can be partially described, but not completely.

Knowledge of people and context. A long-serving supervisor knows who on the team can be trusted with which type of responsibility, who needs support in which way, who is quietly dealing with something that hasn’t been said aloud. This is operationally important knowledge that doesn’t appear in any document.

Experience handling non-standard situations. When an incident occurs that the SOP doesn’t cover, the person who resolves it best doesn’t work from a document — they work from judgment built through similar situations in the past.

Tacit knowledge has a defining characteristic, directly opposite to explicit knowledge: it cannot exist independently of the person who holds it. When they leave, it leaves with them.

Why most organizations only manage one type

The reason most organizations focus on explicit knowledge and have no clear strategy for tacit knowledge isn’t that they don’t recognize its importance — it’s that explicit knowledge is simply much easier to manage.

Explicit knowledge can be:

• Stored in a system
• Version-controlled
• Searched and retrieved
• Checked in an audit
• Measured (exists or doesn’t, which version)

Tacit knowledge cannot. It cannot be “stored” in any conventional sense. It cannot be “audited.” There’s no clear metric for it.

The result: explicit knowledge receives attention because it’s easier to handle — not because it’s more important.

But in real manufacturing operations, tacit knowledge is often what drives the actual difference: between a production shift that runs smoothly and one that encounters problems, between a reliable quality inspector and an inexperienced one, between a correct response to an incident and one that costs several additional hours.

Converting tacit to explicit — how far is possible?

This is the most practically important question.

The short answer: partially, but never completely.

What can be partially converted:

From experience to decision frameworks. Instead of simply writing “inspect raw material color,” it’s possible to document: “acceptable color range is X to Y; abnormal indicators requiring reporting are A, B, C.” This is a partial explicit version of sensory tacit knowledge — imperfect but more useful than nothing.

From judgment to decision tables. Instead of leaving experienced people to “just know what to do when,” it’s possible to document: “when conditions X and Y occur together, the steps to follow are…” Decision tables don’t replace experience, but they narrow the gap for newer staff.

From experience to case studies. Recording non-standard incidents that occurred: what the problem was, how it was handled, what the outcome was. This captures part of the tacit knowledge of the person who resolved the situation — and creates a reference for people facing similar situations later.

What cannot be fully converted: the felt sense of balance, fine-grained perceptual judgment, synthesis of many subtle signals simultaneously, and relationship trust between people.

Appropriate strategies for each type

Once the distinction between tacit and explicit knowledge is clear, the practical question is: what strategies are appropriate for each?

For explicit knowledge

Goal: well-organized, easy to find, consistently updated, and connected to actual operational workflows.

Appropriate strategies: a document management system with version control, clear approval processes, mechanisms for updating when reality changes, and ensuring documents are accessible at the point of execution — not just in folders no one knows how to find.

For tacit knowledge

The goal is not “document everything” — that’s neither feasible nor productive. The goal is: reduce the risk of knowledge loss, accelerate knowledge transfer, and capture what can be partially converted to explicit form.

Appropriate strategies:

Structured mentoring and shadowing. Not just having new employees observe, but a deliberate plan: in the first month, the new person will work alongside an experienced colleague in these specific situations, recording these specific observations.

Case study and debriefing after non-standard incidents. Each unusual situation is an opportunity to capture tacit knowledge. Rather than simply resolving it and moving on, a 30-minute structured debrief can record how the experienced person analyzed the problem and made their decision.

Knowledge interviews before important employees leave. This is a practice few organizations implement but which has high value. Not the standard exit interview, but a focused conversation: “what situations do you handle from experience that aren’t in any document?” and “what decisions do you routinely make based on judgment rather than procedure?”

Identify and reduce single-person dependencies. For knowledge that can’t be converted to explicit form, the strategy is ensuring more than one person holds it — rather than allowing any single person to be the sole repository.

A practical lens

The distinction between tacit and explicit knowledge isn’t an academic exercise. It’s a tool for asking the right questions:

Which knowledge in our organization is explicit and could be better managed through documentation?

Which knowledge is tacit and at high risk if the person who holds it leaves?

What portion of our tacit knowledge could be partially converted to explicit form — and is that investment worthwhile?

What strategies are appropriate for reducing tacit knowledge risk without requiring complete documentation?

These are the questions a knowledge management strategy needs to answer — and they all begin with understanding the difference between these two types.

Which type of knowledge is your organization managing — and which is being left unaddressed?

→ Take the KM Maturity Assessment

Further reading:

• When Key Employees Leave: What They Take With Them (previous)
• SOPs Are in Place — So Why Aren’t They Being Followed? (related)
• AI Productivity vs. Organizational Intelligence (Cluster 2 — cross-cluster)
• From Individual Knowledge to Organizational Knowledge (pillar)

The tacit/explicit distinction draws on the work of Michael Polanyi (1966, “The Tacit Dimension”) and its development by Nonaka & Takeuchi in “The Knowledge-Creating Company” (1995). Examples and strategies presented are practical applications for manufacturing SME environments — not direct citations from academic theory.