Tacit Knowledge: The Most Valuable Asset You're Probably Not Managing
The 80% You Can't Google
Ask any experienced professional what makes them effective and they'll struggle to articulate it fully. The judgment calls, the pattern recognition, the instinct for when something feels off — this is tacit knowledge, and by most estimates it represents the vast majority of an organization's intellectual capital.
Yet almost all knowledge management effort goes toward the other kind: explicit knowledge that can be written down in documents, policies, and procedures.
Why Documents Aren't Enough
There's a fundamental difference between knowing what to do and knowing how to do it well. A procedure document tells you the steps. Tacit knowledge tells you which step matters most, what to watch for, and when to deviate from the script.
Consider a senior engineer troubleshooting a production issue. The runbook covers the standard checks. But the engineer also knows that this particular system tends to fail in a specific way under load, that the monitoring dashboard underreports latency by ~15%, and that the last three incidents with similar symptoms all traced back to the same upstream dependency. None of that is in the runbook.
The Three Barriers to Tacit Knowledge Capture
1. People Don't Know What They Know
Expertise becomes automatic over time. Skilled professionals often can't articulate their decision-making process because it has become intuitive. Asking them to "write it down" produces incomplete results at best.
2. Context Gets Lost in Translation
Even when experts try to document their knowledge, critical context evaporates. A written explanation strips away the nuance, the caveats, and the situational awareness that make the knowledge valuable.
3. There's No Natural Trigger
Explicit knowledge has clear creation moments: someone writes a policy, builds a training deck, or updates a wiki. Tacit knowledge has no equivalent trigger. It accumulates gradually through experience and typically only becomes visible when it's missing — after someone leaves.
What Actually Works
The most effective approaches to tacit knowledge capture share a common trait: they don't ask experts to stop what they're doing and document things. Instead, they capture expertise as a byproduct of normal work.
Structured Q&A platforms that let anyone ask questions and route them to the right expert create a continuous stream of captured tacit knowledge. Every answer — with its context, caveats, and nuance — becomes a reusable asset.
Peer review mechanisms add a trust layer. When other experts validate or refine an answer, the captured knowledge gains credibility and completeness.
Intelligent routing ensures questions reach people who actually have the relevant experience, rather than being broadcast to general channels where they may go unanswered.
Measuring What You're Missing
The hardest part of tacit knowledge management is that you can't easily measure what you don't have. But there are reliable proxy indicators:
- Time-to-competency for new hires — if it takes months for new people to become effective, tacit knowledge transfer is slow
- Repeated questions — if the same questions come up regularly, answers aren't being captured or aren't findable
- Expert bottlenecks — if specific people are constantly pulled into meetings, reviews, and decisions, their expertise hasn't been distributed
The Knowledge Management Maturity Assessment evaluates tacit knowledge practices alongside six other critical KM dimensions — giving a clear picture of where the biggest gaps and opportunities are.