You know more than you think
This blog post seeks to answer the following questions
What is tacit knowledge?
How do I recognise and capture my tacit knowledge?
How do I recognise my lack of knowledge?
What is tacit knowledge?
Let’s imagine you’re teaching someone to run a workshop. You give them a slide pack, some guidance around timing, and talk through the slides. After this discussion, they can run the workshop as well as you, right? Well, no, they need a lot more practice.
Tacit knowledge is based on a high level of experience and intuition, making it challenging to communicate with others. Explicit knowledge, on the other hand, is easy to codify.
How do I recognise and capture my tacit knowledge?
Time for some magic potions…
In the film Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, you’ll see the whole class working with a recipe book to create potions. They are all struggling with the task at hand. However, there’s a book that has many scribbled notes on how to make the recipes work. The note writer has undertaken many tweaks and changes to create a great result. The knowledge gained by doing the task and perfecting the result has been documented. This is the secret to recognising and capturing tacit knowledge. We should document it as we uncover it.
Let’s return to the workshop example. We often find ourselves giving advice to people verbally as they ask us questions. The person may be asking for more detail about timing and we give some helpful advice. By recognising the advice as useful additional knowledge, we can improve the workshop by writing it down. I will always improve my training and workshops like this. I’ll find myself adding new details that are not included as I talk. Making a note of these points and adding them helps me identify my tacit knowledge and improve the outputs for others to use. Once you get into this mindset, you may find yourself documenting rather a lot, but it doesn’t always mean you have to pass all the information this way. You could train the person to run the workshop verbally, then when they are running it sub-optimally you can guide them with a conversation. At the point where they are doing well, you can remind them that if they need to refer to detailed instructions, they have been written down.
How do I recognise my lack of knowledge?
Training can make us feel like we have more skill than we do. Here are two examples:
Become a Scrum “Master” in our 5-day course, read the shiny training literature. As you receive your certificate, you believe you are ready to lead your team to success. When you start to implement the change you struggle to get the process working well.
You find yourself at the end of a complex training course saying to yourself, “I already knew that.” When you start to put your knowledge into practice, you struggle, and you realise you didn’t know the subject that well after all.
I often find that we overestimate our knowledge at the start of our learning journey. We believe we have more skill than we actually do. When we come to put the knowledge into practice, things are far from simple, or we simply can’t remember what we were taught.
This results in more damage than is first obvious:
When you feed back your satisfaction with the training, the trainer then thinks they have successfully trained you, even though they haven’t. This means the courses don’t improve and neither does the trainers technique. More and more people are trained with these ineffective techniques. When people don’t learn it is blamed on them, either their intelligence, ability to follow instructions or effort level.
When you are about to start a new role or complex, unfamiliar task, and you believe you are skilled enough to do it and fail.
Training may not be enough for complex subjects; we need mentoring from people with real skills. Make sure you have the right level of support in place when taking on complex new tasks.