Source: Why Tacit Knowledge is More Important Than Deliberate Practice | Commonplace Blog, by Cedric Chin
Tacit knowledge is knowledge that cannot be captured through words alone. … tacit knowledge instruction happens through things like imitation, emulation, and apprenticeship. You learn by copying what the master does, blindly, until you internalise the principles behind the actions.
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If you are a knowledge worker, tacit knowledge is a lot more important to the development of your field of expertise than you might think.
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I don’t mean to say that Hieu or the senior software engineer couldn’t explain their judgment, or that they couldn’t make explicit the principles they used to evaluate the tradeoffs between a dozen or so variables: they could. My point is that their explanations would not lead me to the same ability that they had.Why is this the case? Well, take a look at the conversation again. When I pushed these people on their judgments, they would try to explain in terms of principles or heuristics. But the more I pushed, the more exceptions and caveats and potential gotchas I unearthed.
Could it — in principle — be possible to externalise tacit knowledge into a list of instructions? … The consensus answer to that question seems to be: “Yes, in principle it is possible to do so. In practice it is very difficult.” My take on this is that it is so difficult that we shouldn’t even bother