Tacit Knowledge in Management Studies: The Great Misunderstanding
Tacit knowledge in the SECI model
As mentioned earlier, ‘tacit knowledge’ has become very popular in management studies since the middle 1990s, thanks, to a large extent, to Nonaka and Takeuchi’s (1995) influential The Knowledge-Creating Company. The cornerstone of Nonaka and Takeuchi’s theory of organizational knowledge creation (the so-called SECI model) is the notion of ‘knowledge conversion’—how tacit knowledge is ‘converted’ to explicit knowledge, and vice versa (Nonaka and Takeuchi, 1995: 61). The authors distinguish four modes of knowledge conversion: from tacit knowledge to tacit knowledge (socialization); from tacit knowledge to explicit knowledge (externalization); from explicit knowledge to explicit knowledge (combination); and from explicit knowledge to tacit knowledge (internalization). Tacit knowledge is converted to tacit knowledge through observation, imitation, and practice, in those cases where an apprentice learns from a master. Tacit knowledge is converted to explicit knowledge when it is articulated through concepts, models, hypotheses, metaphors, and analogies. Explicit knowledge is converted to explicit knowledge when different bodies of explicit knowledge are combined. And explicit knowledge is converted into tacit knowledge when it is first verbalized and then absorbed and internalized by the individuals involved.
The organizational knowledge creation process proceeds in cycles (in a spiral-like fashion), with each cycle consisting of five phases: the sharing of tacit knowledge among the members of a team; the creation of concepts whereby a team articulates its commonly shared mental model; the justification of concepts in terms of the overall organizational purposes and objectives; the building of an archetype which is a tangible manifestation of the justified concept; and the cross-leveling of knowledge, whereby a new cycle of knowledge creation may be created elsewhere (or even outside of the organization.)
To illustrate their theory, Nonaka and Takeuchi describe the product development process of Matsushita’s Home Bakery, the first fully automated bread-making machine for home use, which was introduced to the Japanese market in 1987. There were three cycles in the relevant knowledge-creation process, with each cycle starting in order to either remove the weaknesses of the previous one or improve upon its outcome. The first cycle ended with the assemblage of a prototype, which, however, was not up to the design team’s standards regarding the quality of bread it produced. This triggered the second cycle which started when Ikuko Tanaka, a software developer, took an apprenticeship with a master baker at the Osaka International Hotel. Her purpose was to learn how to knead bread dough properly in order to ‘convert’ later this know-how into particular design features of the bread-making machine under development. Following this, the third cycle came into operation whereby the commercialization team, consisting of people drawn from the manufacturing and marketing department, further improved the prototype that came out of the second cycle, and made it a commercially viable product.
To obtain a better insight into what Nonaka and Takeuchi mean by ‘tacit knowledge’ and how it is related to ‘explicit knowledge’ it is worth zooming into their description of the second cycle of the knowledge-creation process, since this is the cycle most relevant to the acquisition and ‘conversion’ of tacit knowledge. Below I quote in full the authors’ description of this cycle (references and figures have been omitted).
The second cycle began with a software developer, Ikuko Tanaka, sharing the tacit knowledge of a master baker in order to learn his kneading skill. A master baker learns the art of kneading, a critical step in bread making, following years of experience. However, such expertise is difficult to articulate in words. To capture this tacit knowledge, which usually takes a lot of imitation and practice to master, Tanaka proposed a creative solution. Why not train with the head baker at Osaka International Hotel, which had a reputation for making the best bread in Osaka, to study the kneading techniques? Tanaka learned her kneading skills through observation, imitation, and practice. She recalled:
‘At first, everything was a surprise. After repeated failures, I began to ask where the master and I differed. I don’t think one can understand or learn this skill without actually doing it. His bread and mine [came out] quite different even though we used the same materials. I asked why our products were so different and tried to reflect the difference in our skill of kneading.’
Even at this stage, neither the head baker nor Tanaka was able to articulate knowledge in any systematic fashion. Because their tacit knowledge never became explicit, others within Matsushita were left puzzled. Consequently, engineers were also brought to the hotel and allowed to knead and bake bread to improve their understanding of the process. Sano, the division chief, noted, ‘If the craftsmen cannot explain their skills, then the engineers should become craftsmen.’
Not being an engineer, Tanaka could not devise mechanical specifications. However, she was able to transfer her knowledge to the engineers by using the phrase ‘twisting stretch’ to provide a rough image of kneading, and by suggesting the strength and speed of the propeller to be used in kneading. She would simply say, ‘Make the propeller move stronger,’ or ‘Move it faster.’ Then the engineers would adjust the machine specifications. Such a trial-and-error process continued for several months.
Her request for a ‘twisting stretch’ movement was interpreted by the engineers and resulted in the addition inside the case of special ribs that held back the dough when the propeller turned so that the dough could be stretched. After a year of trial and error and working closely with other engineers, the team came up with product specifications that successfully reproduced the head baker’s stretching technique and the quality of bread Tanaka had learned to make at the hotel. The team then materialized this concept, putting it together into a manual, and embodied it in the product.
(Nonaka and Takeuchi: 1995: 103–106; italics in the original)
How should we understand tacit knowledge?
Nonaka and Takeuchi’s underlying assumption is that tacit knowledge is knowledge-on-its-way-to-symbolic-representation: a set of rules, as yet unformulated, that symbolically represent the activity an actor is involved in. The authors seem to think that what Tanaka learned through her apprenticeship with the master baker can be ultimately crystallized in a set of propositional ‘if-then’ statements (Tsoukas, 1998: 44–48), or what Oakeshott (1991: 12–15) called ‘technical knowledge’ and Ryle (1963: 28–32) ‘knowing that.’ In that sense, the tacit knowledge involved in kneading that Tanaka picked up through her apprenticeship—in Oakeshott’s (1991: 12–15) terms, the ‘practical knowledge’ of kneading; and in Ryle’s (1963: 28–32) terms, ‘knowing how’ to knead—the sort of knowledge that exists only in use and cannot be fully formulated in rules, is equivalent to the set of statements that represent it, namely it is equivalent to technical knowledge.
Tacit knowledge is thought to have the structure of a syllogism and, as such, can be reversed and, therefore, even mechanized (cf. Polanyi and Prosch, 1975: 40). What Tanaka was missing, the authors imply, were the premises of the syllogism, which she acquired through her sustained apprenticeship. Once they had been learned, it was a matter of time before she could put them together and arrive at the conclusion that ‘twisting stretch’ and ‘the [right] movements required for the kneading propeller’ (Nonaka and Takeuchi, 1995: 103–106) were what was required for designing the right bread-making machine.
However, although Nonaka and Takeuchi rightly acknowledge that Tanaka’s apprenticeship was necessary because ‘the art of kneading’ could not be imparted in any other way, e.g. ‘through reading memos and manuals’ (Nonaka and Takeuchi, 1995: 103), they view her apprenticeship as merely an alternative mechanism for transferring knowledge. In terms of content, knowledge acquired through apprenticeship is not thought to be qualitatively different from knowledge acquired through reading manuals, since in both cases the content of knowledge can, ultimately, be formulated in rules—only the manner of its appropriation differs. The mechanism of knowledge acquisition may be different, but the result is the same.
The ‘conduit metaphor of communication’ (Lakoff, 1995: 116; Reddy, 1979; Tsoukas, 2005) that underlies Nonaka and Takeuchi’s perspective—the view of ideas as objects which can be extracted from people and transmitted to others over a conduit—reduces practical knowledge to technical knowledge (cf. Costelloe, 1998: 325–326). However, while Tanaka, clearly, learned a technique during her apprenticeship, she acquired much more than technical knowledge, without even realizing it (Cleeremans, 1997; French and Cleeremans, 2002): she learned to make bread in a way that cannot be fully formulated in propositions but only manifested in her work. To treat practical knowledge as having a precisely definable content, which is initially located in the head of the practitioner and then ‘translated’ (Nonaka and Takeuchi, 1995: 105) into explicit knowledge, is to reduce what is known to what is representable, thus impoverishing the notion of practical knowledge. As Oakeshott remarks:
a pianist acquires artistry as well as technique, a chess-player style and insight into the game as well as a knowledge of the moves, and a scientist acquires (among other things) the sort of judgment which tells him when his technique is leading him astray and the connoisseurship which enables him to distinguish the profitable from the unprofitable directions to explore.
(Oakeshott, 1991: 15)
As should be clear from the preceding section, by viewing all knowing as essentially ‘personal knowing’ (Polanyi, 1962: 49), Polanyi highlights the skilled performance that all acts of knowing require: actors do not explicitly know all the rules they follow in the activity they are involved in. Like Oakeshott (1991), Polanyi (1962: 50) notes that ‘rules of art can be useful, but they do not determine the practice of an art; they are maxims, which can serve as a guide to an art only if they can be integrated into the practical knowledge of the art. They cannot replace that knowledge.’ It is precisely because what needs to be known cannot be specified in detail (Cleeremans, 1997) that the relevant knowledge must be passed from master to apprentice. It is not a question of mental speed, as Collins (2007: 258–259) implies, but of radical ignorance: even the master does not fully know what he or she knows; a lot of that knowledge is embodied and no descriptive terms to express it are possessed.
However, what cannot be expressed may well be manifested. And what may not be linguistically imparted may well be imitated.
To learn by example is to submit to authority. You follow your master because you trust his manner of doing things even when you cannot analyse and account in detail for its effectiveness. By watching the master and emulating his efforts in the presence of his example, the apprentice unconsciously picks up the rules of the art, including those which are not explicitly known to the master himself. These hidden rules can be assimilated only by a person who surrenders himself to that extent uncritically to the imitation of another.
(Polanyi, 1962: 53)
Like Polanyi’s medical student discussed earlier, Tanaka was initially puzzled by what the master baker was doing—‘at first, everything was a surprise’ (Nonaka and Takeuchi, 1995: 104), as she put it. Her ‘repeated failures’ were due not to lack of knowledge as such, but due to not having interiorized the relevant knowledge yet. When, through practice, she began to assimilate the knowledge involved in kneading bread—namely, when she became subsidiarily aware of how she was kneading—she could, subsequently, turn her focal awareness to the task at hand: kneading bread, as opposed to imitating the master. Knowledge now became a tool to be tacitly known and uncritically used in the service of an objective. ‘Kneading bread’ ceased to be an object of focal awareness and became an instrument for actually kneading bread—a subsidiarily known tool for getting things done (Winograd and Flores, 1987: 27–37). For Tanaka to ‘convert’ her kneading skill into explicit knowledge, she would need to focus her attention on her subsidiary knowledge, thereby becoming focally aware of it. In that event, however, she would no longer be engaged in the same activity, namely bread kneading, but in the activity of thinking about bread kneading, which is a different matter. The particulars of her skill were ‘logically unspecifiable’ (Polanyi, 1962: 56): their specification would logically contradict and practically paralyze the performance at hand.
Of course, one might acknowledge this and still insist, along with Ambrosini and Bowman (2001) and Eraut (2000), that Tanaka could, ex post facto, reflect on her kneading skill, in the context of discussing bread kneading with her colleagues (the engineers), and turn it into explicit knowledge. But this would be a problematic claim to make for, in such an event, she would no longer be describing her kneading skill in toto but only its technical part: that which is possible to represent in rules, principles, and maxims—in short, in propositions. What she has to say about the ‘ineffable’ (Polanyi, 1962: 87–95) part of her skill, that which is tacitly known, she has already ‘said’ through her action—the kneading of bread (cf. Oakeshott, 1991: 14; Janik, 1992: 37). As Polanyi so perceptively argued, you cannot view subsidiary particulars as they allegedly are in themselves for they exist always in conjunction with the focus through which you attend to them, and that makes them unspecifiable. In his words:
Subsidiary or instrumental knowledge, as I have defined it, is not known in itself but is known in terms of something focally known, to the quality of which it contributes; and to this extent it is unspecifiable. Analysis may bring subsidiary knowledge into focus and formulate it as a maxim or as a feature in a physiognomy, but such specification is in general not exhaustive. Although the expert diagnostician, taxonomist and cotton-classer can indicate their clues and formulate their maxims, they know many more things than they can tell, knowing them only in practice, as instrumental particulars, and not explicitly, as objects. The knowledge of such particulars is therefore ineffable, and the pondering of a judgment in terms of such particulars is an ineffable process of thought.
(Polanyi, 1962: 88)
If the above is accepted, it follows that Tanaka neither ‘transferred’ her tacit knowledge to the engineers, nor did she ‘convert’ her kneading skill into explicit knowledge, as Nonaka and Takeuchi (1995: 104 and 105) suggest. She could do neither of these things simply because, following Polanyi’s and Oakeshott’s definitions of tacit and practical knowledge respectively, skillful knowing contains an ineffable element; it is based on an act of personal insight that is essentially inexpressible.