Even if the above is accepted, we still need to address a nagging question: how are we to understand Tanaka’s concept of ‘twisting stretch,’ which turned out to be so crucial for the making of Matsushita’s bread-making machine? If this concept did not help ‘convert’ tacit to explicit knowledge, what did it do? Or, to put it more generally, does the ineffability of skilled performance imply that we cannot talk about it? That the skills involved in, say, bread making, managing, teaching, selling, diagnosing patients, and so on will ultimately be mystical experiences outside the realm of reasoned inquiry? Are there ways to improve a practical activity if its core remains ineffable?
As argued earlier, a socio-material practice provides its members with an inarticulate background against which practitioners make focal sense of their particular tasks. When socialized in a practice, its members learn how to use the key distinctions that define it (for example, what constitutes competence, orientation to time, relations to others, etc.) (Tsoukas, 2009a: 943; 2010: 50; Yanow and Tsoukas, 2009: 1349–50). Through engagement in the world of their practice, its members acquire familiarity with it, which, later, they may seek to formulate explicitly in thought. Hatsopoulos and Hatsopoulos (1999: 144–5), for example, describe how, through trial and error, they discovered the usefulness of certain business principles, such as an empathic approach to employees, seeking diversity of backgrounds on the board, and understanding investors’ non-financial motives.
Increased familiarity helps practitioners interiorize the tools they use in their practice and, thus, focus on the tasks at hand. Repeated experiences in the carrying out of tasks are unconsciously linked by practitioners to form a pattern (Klein, 1998: 31–33, 2003: 21). Patterns enable practitioners to recognize situations as typical or anomalous, and thus adopt relevant courses of action. Knowledge of patterns is tacit: repeated experiences, organized in patterns, are internalized and subsidiarily drawn upon by practitioners when faced with particular tasks. Patterns have a radial structure: the latter is formed around a relatively stable part made up of prototypical (central) members and an unstable part made up of non-prototypical (peripheral) members, radiating at various conceptual distances from the central members (Johnson, 1993; Lakoff, 1987). For example, Cimino describes this in the context of medical practice as follows:
It is only by seeing patient after patient that the recognition patterns develop. From these experiences, the physician can build a set of case prototypes by which to compare future patients. These prototypes can help recognize patterns . . . They can also help the physician recognize when something is out of place
(Cimino, 1999: 116; for several similar examples, see Klein, 1998, 2003)
The radial structure of practical experience is important since it enables practitioners to judge prototypicality and to spontaneously undertake appropriate action (Klein, 1998: 149) without making tacit knowledge of patterns explicit. Rather, focal awareness of a particular issue subsidiarily draws on familiar patterns in the undertaking of action. In such cases, the practitioner is absorbed in the task at hand: he or she spontaneously copes with (responds to) the solicitations of the task at hand (Dreyfus, 1991: 69). When, however, the results of action undertaken do not meet the practitioner’s tacit expectations, his or her absorbed coping with the situation calls for deliberate reflection. What was previously subsidiary now becomes focal (Patel et al., 1999: 95–96).
For example, Yanow and Tsoukas (2009) describe how Dr T., an experienced professor of psychology, deviated from his flow of teaching to respond to a feeling of puzzlement he had momentarily sensed in his students. ‘What was previously transparent or subsidiary—namely, what he needed to do, as he had done many times before, to explain the subject of his lecture—becomes more explicitly focal,’ note Yanow and Tsoukas (2009: 1356). Accordingly, Dr T. improvises and inserts a relevant example in his presentation. Notice, however, that the tacit background, the ‘unexplicited horizon’ (Taylor, 1995: 68) within which Dr T. was acting, is not something of which he was simply unaware as I am unaware of Phobaeticus chani, allegedly the longest insect in the world, recently discovered in Borneo. Rather, his unawareness was different: it was focal unawareness. The background was known, albeit subsidiarily, and could, thus, be in principle articulated. ‘What I bring out to articulacy,’ notes Taylor (1995: 69), ‘is what I ‘always knew,’ as we might say, or what I had a ‘sense’ of, even if I didn’t ‘know’ it.’ The background has a paradoxical status. ‘It can be made explicit, because we aren’t completely unaware of it. But the expliciting itself supposes a background’ (Taylor, 1995: 70).
Thus, when Dr T shifts his attention from being absorbed in the task at hand (i.e. lecturing) to the tool with which he was accomplishing it (e.g. what example to use to illustrate his point), that shift occurs against a new background—that of a temporary breakdown, namely a mild disruption of absorbed coping, which forces Dr T. to pay deliberate attention to how he is accomplishing the task at hand (Dreyfus, 1991: 72–3; Yanow and Tsoukas, 2009: 1352). The new background, created by disruption (temporary breakdown), makes it possible for aspects of the old background to be articulated. This is a process that can go on and on.
To put it differently, at any point in time, aspects of the background within which a particular task is carried out may be brought to awareness when probed in the context of a temporary breakdown. We are not aware of the full implications of what we do until we encounter an obstacle—a Platonic aporia—that forces us to look back at the patterns we tacitly know in order to resume our action afresh (Patel et al., 1999: 96; Cleeremans, 1997: 227). Thus, looked at patterns serve as ‘displays’ (Weick, 1977: 279) available for inspection: actors can articulate further what was already included in the background in an inchoate form. To paraphrase Weick (1995: 23), actors discover their tacit knowledge by undertaking action and observing the consequences. Since, as argued earlier, subsidiaries are manifested rather than specified, their patterns are accessed when they are given the opportunity to be displayed. Displays are brought forward (and thus a new background is created) by temporary breakdowns, thus forcing actors to reflect, even momentarily, on what they do.
What do we do when we reflect on our absorbed coping? We re-punctuate the distinctions underlying the practical activities we are involved in. We pay attention to certain hitherto unnoticed aspects of our activities and see connections among items previously thought unconnected (D’Eredita and Baretto, 2006: 1834; Weick, 1995: 87 and 126). Through attention-drawing forms of talk (e.g. ‘look at this,’ ‘have you thought about this in that way?’, ‘try this,’ ‘imagine this,’ ‘compare this to that’) we are moved to review the situation we are in, to relate to our circumstances in a different way. From a Wittgensteinian perspective, Shotter and Katz summarize succinctly this process as follows:
to gain an explicit understanding of our everyday, practical activities, we can make use of the very same methods we used in gaining that practical kind of understanding in the first place—that is, we can use the self-same methods for drawing our attention to how people draw each other’s attention to things, as they themselves (we all?) in fact use!
(Shotter and Katz, 1996: 230)
Notice what Shotter and Katz are saying: we learn to engage in practical activities through our participation in socio-material practices, under the guidance of people who are more experienced than us (MacIntyre, 1985: 181–203; Taylor, 1993b); people who, by drawing our attention to certain things, make us ‘see connections’ (Wittgenstein, 1958: No.122; see also Shotter, 1993; 2005), similarly to the way in which the master baker was drawing Tanaka’s attention to certain aspects of bread kneading. Through her subsequent conversations with the engineers, Tanaka was able to articulate her understanding of the kneading activity she had been involved in, by having her attention drawn to how the master baker was drawing her attention to kneading—hence the concept of ‘twisting stretch’ came up. It is in this sense that Wittgenstein talks of language as issuing reminders of things we already know: ‘Something that we know when no one asks us, but no longer know when we are supposed to give an account of it, is something that we need to remind ourselves of’ (Wittgenstein, 1958: No.89; italics in the original).
In other words, in her apprenticeship, Tanaka came eventually to practice ‘twisting stretch’ but she did not focally know it. She needed to be ‘reminded’ of it. How did it happen? Dialogically, through conversational interactions with the engineers (Tsoukas, 2009a, 2009b). ‘Twisting stretch,’ as I have explained elsewhere (Tsoukas, 2009a: 947), is a new distinction—a novel combination of two concepts, created through extensive dialogical exchanges between Tanaka and the engineers, whereby the property of the modifier (‘twisting’) applies to the head concept (‘stretch’), thus providing an image of the kneading movement required. (For additional mechanisms whereby new distinctions come about, see Tsoukas, 2009a, 2009b).
More generally, when dialogue is productive we have opportunities to recursively punctuate our understanding and, thus, see new connections and ‘[give] prominence to distinctions which our ordinary forms of language easily makes us overlook’ (Wittgenstein, 1958: No.132). As Merleau-Ponty (1962: 354) so perceptively remarked, when engaged in a productive dialogue, ‘[my interlocutor] draws from me thoughts which I had no idea I possessed.’ Through dialogical exchanges we are led to notice certain aspects of our circumstances that, due to their familiarity, remain hidden (‘one is unable to notice something—because it is always before one’s eyes’ (Wittgenstein, 1958: No.129). This is, then, the sense in which, although skilled performance is ultimately ineffable, it nonetheless can be talked about: through dialogically reminding ourselves of it, we notice certain important features which had hitherto escaped our attention and can now be seen in a new context. Consequently, we are led to relate to our circumstances in new ways and, thus, see new ways forward.