Business Processes and Knowledge Management

Types of Knowledge: Tacit and Explicit

Nonaka and Takeuchi’s book (1995) popularized the concepts of tacit and explicit knowledge, as well as KM more generally. They based their thinking on that of Michael Polanyi (1966), expressed most memorably in his phrase “we know more than we can tell.”

It is important to realize that tacit and explicit knowledge are not mutually exclusive concepts. Rather, any piece of knowledge has both tacit and explicit elements, as shown in Figure 1. The size of the inner circle represents the proportion of tacit knowledge: the tacit core at the heart of the knowledge that we “cannot tell.” Figure 1(a) shows a case where the knowledge is almost entirely tacit, as in riding a bicycle. Figure 1(b) shows mainly explicit knowledge, where the tacit core is very small, for example how to process a claim for travel expenses in an organization. Figure 1(c) shows an intermediate case, such as making a piece of furniture, where substantial amounts of both tacit and explicit knowledge are involved.

Figure 1.

The relationship between tacit and explicit knowledge

KM Strategies

Hansen, Nohria and Tierney (1999) identified that there are two fundamental KM strategies, codification and personalization. Codification concentrates more on explicit knowledge (typically relying very heavily on information technology), personalization more on tacit knowledge (stressing interactions between people). They advocate that an emphasis on one fundamental KM strategy but also including an element of the other, in an 80-20 proportion, is likely to be the most successful.