Knowledge Matters™

Today David Snowden has an interesting blog with the title “Ignorance, opportunism, trivialisation, & hijacking”. He uses the metaphor of the four horseman of the apocalypse for new ideas and concepts, with each word representing a horseman. This metaphor resonates with me. His argument is I think well considered, and brings me to my point. In this world of instant access it is too easy to find information on an idea or concept and then take a bit of it, without understanding its foundations and limitations. Often the problem is the information we find is piecemeal and has been filtered through many disparate world views. Each filter changes the context of the idea. We need to take the time to go back to source documents. I’ll use the idea of tacit and explicit knowledge as an example of how concepts become corrupted.

Ikjiro Nonaka and Hirotaka Takeuchi are widely quoted and sometimes credited with the idea of tacit and explicit knowledge. However the idea rightly belongs with Michael Polanyi, who in fairness was acknowledged by Nonaka and Takeuchi. Polanyi believed that knowledge was both individually and collectively formed in a constant cycle between personal tacit knowledge and public explicit knowledge, but that all public explicit knowledge has a tacit dimension. He said public explicit knowledge is at once both tacit and explicit and based in individual experience (Polanyi 1966). Note that he says knowledge is at once both tacit and explicit.

Nonaka and his colleagues took this idea and built on it to come up with their famous SECI model. Nonaka and Takeuchi are now among the most widely quoted thinkers in the knowledge management literature, however much of their work has been misquoted, or incompletely quoted. In particular they say there are two types of tacit knowledge – the technical and cognitive. Further they actually say that “Knowledge is not either explicit or tacit. Knowledge is both explicit and tacit” (Takeuchi & Nonaka 2004, p. 4).

Half of the black art problems of the knowledge management discipline come from this artificial split into tacit and explicit knowledge by knowledge practitioners; something that was never intended in the first place! To avoid this type of problem we should take the time to review source documents – they matter!

Regards, Graham.

References:

Polanyi, M 1966, The tacit dimension, Doubleday, Garden City, New York.

Takeuchi, H & Nonaka, I 2004, Hitotsubashi on knowledge management, John Wiley and Sons Asia, Singapore City.