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Why Tacit Knowledge is important

• Tacit knowledge does exist, and understanding that it does exist is one of the most useful things you can have happen to you. Once you understand that tacit knowledge exists, you will begin to see that big parts of any skill tree is tacit in nature, which means that you can go hunting for it, which in turn means you can start to ask the really useful question when it comes to expertise, which is: that person has it; that person is really good at it; how can I have it too?

• The way to learn experts' techniques is to copy them: to design some software and then ask for his feedback, for example. If you ever hear someone explaining things in terms of a long list of caveats, the odds are good that you’re looking at tacit knowledge in action.

• Learning complicated judgment — an instantaneous solution selection that happens to balance dozens of considerations against each other — this is what is valuable to learn. And it is almost impossible to learn it through explanation alone.

• In principle it is possible to make tacit knowledge explicit. In practice it is very difficult. It is so difficult that we shouldn’t even bother — you can give up on turning tacit knowledge into explicit knowledge and just go after tacit knowledge itself.

Copying Better: How To Acquire The Tacit Knowledge of Experts

1. A set of ‘expectancies’— When diagnosing a situation, experts will construct mental simulations of how the events have been evolving and will continue to evolve. In other words, they will have some expectations for what happens next.

2. A set of plausible goals — The expert would know what to prioritise in the moment, and what to defer to a latter time.

3. A set of relevant cues — Experts know what to pay attention to; novices do not. Recognised prototypes come with a set of cues — for instance, when you’ve just started driving, you may find yourself overwhelmed with the dials and knobs and mirrors you have to keep track of.

4. An action script — if the situation is typical, the expert would have a course of action immediately generated in their heads. If the situation is not typical, the expert’s brain would still generate a set of actions, but the expert would slow down to walk through each action step in their head.

1. Systematically Expand the Set of Prototypes You Have (just get more exposure to good thinking and good solutions)

2. Identify When A Practitioner Has a Prototype That You Do Not (so you can understand it from them and also acquire it)

3. Get better at mental simulations

4. Get feedback on an expert on both recognition and simulation

The Three Kinds of Tacit Knowledge

1. Relational tacit knowledge — Knowledge that is tacit because of the way people relate to each other. Sometimes people do not make their knowledge explicit because they do not know how to do so, other times, they do not make their knowledge explicit because they do not want to do so.

2. Somatic tacit knowledge — Knowledge that is tacit because it has to do with the human body. Think of executing a tennis backhand, playing a guitar, or riding a bicycle. This knowledge is tacit because it has to do with the embodied nature of the skill involved.

3. Collective tacit knowledge — Knowledge that is tacit because it is embedded in our social environment, and we do not know how to make it explicit in a way that doesn’t involve socialising.

Using YouTube to learn Tacit Knowledge

1. Don’t just watch one or two examples of the expert doing a technique. Gather multiple examples and try to identify trends or commonalities in the usage of their technique. When you notice such commonalities, try and understand why those commonalities exist.

2. Pay particular attention to context. What happens before or after application of the technique?

3. There will be times when the technique fails. Watch those as well and try to understand what went wrong.

4. Try and look out for variations. These variations represent changes in the action script associated with the prototype in the expert’s head. Sometimes these differences are very subtle, but they are significant. Understanding the variations will give you a better grasp of the technique.

5. It is usually helpful to watch the technique in slow motion (for somatic knowledge). Download the clip and slo-mo it yourself using a free video editing program.