Tacit knowledge is the unwritten, unspoken, and hidden vast storehouse of knowledge held by practically every normal human being, based on his or her emotions, experiences, insights, intuition, observations and internalized information.
Tacit knowledge is integral to the entirety of a person's consciousness, is acquired largely through association with other people, and requires joint or shared activities to be imparted from on to another.
Like the submerged part of an iceberg it constitutes the bulk of what one knows, and forms the underlying framework that makes explicit knowledge possible. Concept of tacit knowledge was introduced by Michael Polanyi in his 1966 book 'The Tacit Dimension'.
Tacit knowledge
|
Explicit knowledge
|
Personal and
context-specific
|
Formal
|
Difficult to
document and communicate. Unwritten and unspoken.
|
Easy to
document, transfer and reproduce.
|
Drawn from
experience and the most powerful form of knowledge.
|
Can become
obsolete quickly.
|
Difficult to
communicate and share.
|
Easy to communicate
and share.
|
Shared only
when individuals are willing to engage in social interaction.
|
Can be
copied and imitated easily.
|
Lives in
people and their practices.
|
Lives in
books and heads.
|
Learning to
be.
|
Learning about.
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Examples:
-decision-making
models
-body
language
|
Examples:
-routines
-procedures
|
