Importance Of Tacit Knowledge

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Introduction
Any time a company has an employee that performs, or has the knowledge of, a critical skill in your organization, the thought of them retiring or leaving can be frightening. The amount of knowledge that could potentially be walking out the door can be detrimental to any company who has not taken the time to develop a safeguard for this critical skill set/knowledge. Although you cannot control what an employee chooses to do (i.e. retire or quit), you do have control over the amount of knowledge that is left behind to someone else in the organization. By developing a tacit knowledge retention program you are ensuring that your company will continue to operate as normal even after the employee or employees have left.
What is knowledge?
It is impossible for a company to retain every single morsel of knowledge they have ever had, besides that, it would also be a waste of time unless the knowledge was critical to the business. In order to determine what knowledge you would like to safeguard from leaving the company, you must first understand the four types of knowledge as defined by David DeLong.
First, there is human knowledge, which is also known as explicit or tacit knowledge. This is known as knowledge that enables a person to have a skill or expertise; this can be cognitive or sentient. Tacit knowledge is often knowledge that has been obtained, but cannot be articulated or communicated to others. Often times, people may not even know they have it or are applying it to their job. This makes it extremely difficult to capture the knowledge and pass it on to other people.
Second, there is social knowledge, which stems from personal/working relationships with individuals, normally from working in groups. This form o...

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...similar teams that are doing similar work. This method is also known to be what many companies consider their “best practices” since it is about learning how to do the task more effectively and efficiently, and can lead to an improvement throughout the whole organization. The knowledge that is being shared is essentially common knowledge, but is actually being put to use to improve the business. Examples of this could be as simple as adopting a new form of technology to be more efficient, or as complex as adopting a new procedure. Once it is shown to work in one group, you can then pass the knowledge to other similar groups in order to improve their effectiveness or efficiency as well. An important aspect of this method is that “the goal of near transfer is not to share knowledge, but rather to meet a specific business goal established by management” (Dixon, 2000).

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