Tacit Knowledge

What is Tacit Knowledge?

Tacit knowledge is the kind of understanding you pick up through doing, not reading. It's the intuitive sense of how things work that builds up over years of experience, the stuff that lives in your head rather than in any manual or database. Think of it as know-how that you can demonstrate but struggle to put into words. A skilled tradesperson might execute a technique flawlessly yet find it nearly impossible to explain every nuance to a newcomer.

Within organizations, tacit knowledge likely makes up a bigger slice of employee expertise than most people realize. It shows up in how an experienced sales rep reads body language during a pitch, or in the gut feeling a seasoned engineer gets when something about a design just seems off. Because this knowledge is so personal and tied to specific contexts, passing it along through conventional documentation rarely works well. This is why knowledge management programs focus so heavily on capturing what experienced people know.

The tricky part? Tacit knowledge tends to walk out the door when employees retire or move on. This leaves gaps that can hit business operations hard. That's why turning tacit knowledge into explicit knowledge through documentation and knowledge sharing efforts matters so much for keeping organizations running smoothly.

Key Characteristics of Tacit Knowledge

• Experience-Based: You develop it through hands-on work and real situations, not from textbooks or formal training sessions.
• Difficult to Articulate: It sits in your subconscious competence, which is why experts often can't fully explain how they make decisions.
• Context-Dependent: What works in one setting or company culture might not translate to another.
• Personal and Subjective: Each person's tacit knowledge gets shaped by their own perspective, beliefs, and mental models.
• Transferred Through Observation: Mentorship, apprenticeships, and working alongside someone tend to be far more effective than written guides for sharing this type of knowledge. Knowledge sharing programs often prioritize these personal interactions.

Tacit Knowledge Examples

Example 1: Manufacturing Floor Expertise

Consider a machine operator with 15 years under their belt. They can hear a subtle shift in how a piece of equipment sounds and know something's about to fail, often before any diagnostic tool picks up on the problem. That ability to recognize patterns through sound and feel? It's not something you can easily put in a manual.

Example 2: Customer Service Excellence

A customer support rep who's handled hundreds of difficult calls develops an instinct for de-escalation. They read the customer's tone, notice word choices, sense the pacing of the conversation. Company policies can be documented, sure, but the judgment call about when to make an exception or when to escalate? That comes from tacit knowledge built through countless interactions.

Example 3: Software Development Intuition

A senior developer glances at code and immediately senses something's wrong with the architecture or spots a potential security hole. They might not be able to point to a specific rule being broken right away. Instead, it's pattern recognition developed over years of seeing what works and what doesn't.

Tacit Knowledge vs Explicit Knowledge

Both types of knowledge have their place, but they're fundamentally different in how they exist and spread within organizations.

How Glitter AI Helps with Tacit Knowledge

Glitter AI tackles the challenge of capturing tacit knowledge by making documentation almost effortless in the moment. When experienced employees walk through processes or talk through their decision-making, Glitter can record those sessions and automatically turn them into searchable documentation. What was once stuck in someone's head becomes explicit knowledge that the whole team can access.

The platform lets subject matter experts create visual guides and annotated walkthroughs quickly, which removes a lot of the friction that usually stops tacit knowledge from ever getting documented. Organizations can more systematically convert the expertise living in employees' minds into lasting knowledge assets, supporting knowledge transfer and reducing dependence on tribal knowledge.