Let's start our discussion of tacit knowledge by exploring Piaget's schemas. I find this is an easy way to grasp how knowledge is built and expanded in our heads. Basically I think of a schema as being a bucket of knowledge.

 

Children don't start with any buckets of knowledge. So they are always building them. Think of a situation where a child sees a bird for the first time. Let’s say it is a magpie (a black and white bird of medium size in Australia). They point and we say, that's a bird, a magpie, it has feathers, a beak and flies. So the child now has a bucket of knowledge called bird, with the features described in it to identify a bird the next time. Next time they see a bird it might be a sparrow (a small brown bird in Australia). They point, we say that’s a bird, a sparrow. Now however the colour has changed and so has the size but it still has a beak, feathers and flies. So the schema, or bucket called bird expands to take in these new features and varieties of bird. This process is referred to as assimilation and accommodation on the concepts of Piaget's schemas. This is because the child isn't building a new schema at this point they are adapting an existing schema to accommodate the new information and for it to assimilated into their working knowledge. Eventually when they have seen many different birds they may have a big bucket called bird, with the shared features of feathers, beak and flies and several smaller buckets within the bird bucket for each type with each of the distinguishing features of each bird above the basics.

 

Adults also store knowledge and learn in similar ways, but our buckets are more complex and when we learn a new topic we don’t start from nothing. We have different experiences to relate to most topics. So when we are building our knowledge, we are making room for the new knowledge within an existing framework. So we are nearly always assimilated and accommodating. For example, a person may have never worked in a contact centre but they have called one, so if they then take a job in a contact centre they have experience from being a customer calling a contact centre. They understand the concept of a contact centre and they would have previous experience speaking to people. They can apply this past experience to frame things they are learning about their new role. However, another person who has worked in a contact centre before has an even more complex understanding. They will both go through learning processes to build their knowledge about what this new role in a contact centre requires of them. However, they will have different knowledge building experiences. The first person’s journey would require expanding a number of buckets of knowledge while the second person’s would be editing and adapting their existing buckets of knowledge. In some ways it is harder for the second person if the new role functions quite differently than their past role as they need to stop doing things in a certain way and start doing them in a new way.

 

Now granted this is a hugely simplified explanation of how we build knowledge and there is much more that needs to be considered but with any complex topic it is best to start simply to give you a basic understanding of the process. A key thing to note here is that tacit knowledge can only be built through learning processes. We discussed in this section the mechanics of building knowledge in our heads. However, the actual process we go through to learn knowledge so that it is retained properly is explored more fully in the Learn section of the Know-Learn-Grow mindset.

 

Take a look at the other pages in this section to understand more about how we define knowledge, how we build explicit knowledge, how knowledge is transferred between tacit and explicit and how to manage this transition.