If I’m looking for Knowledge, where do I look?

As vast as it is, human knowledge comes in only two kinds of containers: It’s found in people, and it’s found in the things we’ve invented to make it permanent.

People are the first (and most important) container. Tacit knowledge is what resides inside our heads, both individually (as in grandma’s recipe for cranberry relish) and collectively (as in a corporate culture). Think “Know How.”

Explicit knowledge is found in documents and formulae and diagrams and other artifacts of human understanding. We couldn’t get by without it, but it can never escape some basic facts:

• Explicit takes time - if you’re working in a new area, you can’t wait for experts to discuss and refine and publish best practices; you need to know now! Knowledge has a shelf life, and while its “best used by” date varies, fresher is usually better. Explicit knowledge isn’t free, either. It takes time and money to get tacit knowledge into reusable form.
   
• Knowledge requires context - you can pull 10 winning proposals from a document library, but with just the documents, it would be hard to puzzle out what made them great. Each was created within a certain context, for a particular client at a particular point in time. To understand them, and why they were winners, you need more than the words on the page.
   
• Knowledge is a team sport - most people learn best through interaction with others. People assimilate new information more effectively when they have the opportunity for questions and conversation. They’re also more willing to share what they know when they’re given the immediate gratification of human interaction. It’s easier to tell the story than write the report. More fun, too.

Beyond these laws of knowledge thermodynamics, explicit knowledge will always be the victim of its own interface. It took more than a century to go from the Dewey Decimal System to Google. Things are getting better all the time, but explicit knowledge can only be as good as the tools that manage it. There is no perfect taxonomy, and even the best search engines can be clumsy in unskilled hands.

So when you’re looking for knowledge, you need to strike a balance that includes both tacit and explicit elements. The right balance will vary based on the knowledge domain. Some (like engineering) may have lots of explicit knowledge assets. Others (like cooking) maybe not so much. There are lots of cook books, but a recipe will only get you so far. Even if it’s for grandma’s relish.

 

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