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Excerpt from:
4th Generation R&D
Managing Knowledge, Technology, and Innovation
Chapter 3, Page 92
This text has been slightly edited for presentation on the web site.
Tacit and Explicit Knowledge
When we speak of "knowledge," most people assume that this refers to knowledge that is written in books and discussed in classrooms and conference rooms, a form referred to as "explicit" knowledge. The distinction between these two forms is critical for innovation, and indeed all aspects of management.
We look to the ancient Greek philosophers, to Plato, Socrates, Pythagoras, and Aristotle, and to their antecedents and peers among the Arabic and the Chinese cultures as the sources from which our traditions of knowledge have come. With reverence for the rational mind, for logic and rhetoric and ethics, our high regard for the Western mind embraces explicit knowledge to the exclusion of nearly everything else.
Extending thousands of years of this intellectual tradition are today's intelligence tests that assess the capacity to recognize rational truths that are hidden in word games and mathematical problems. Measurements such as the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) are widely used by colleges and universities to gauge the academic potential of applicant students. While SAT scores are useful for predicting how successful students are likely to be in college, the test is quite incapable of predicting how well they will do after college in their professional careers. This is because the SAT measures only a student's explicit knowledge, while professional success depends on much more. Although it is little recognized or understood in the West, the complementary dimension of tacit knowledge is critical to success in the "real world."
Scholar and professor Michael Polanyi demonstrates the prevalence and importance of tacit knowledge in our daily experience simply by challenging us to express how it is that we can invariably recognize the faces of those we know. It is not their particular shape or color, but something else, some other essence perhaps, something very specific that nevertheless remains undefinable which enables you to pick out the faces of your family or your colleagues amongst a sea of faces in a crowd. The ability to recognize these faces, those of celebrities whose pictures we have seen, and even people we have only seen once (and perhaps long ago at that) is astonishingly unerring.
The consistency of this ability is reflected in our system of laws, for recognizing someone's face is considered to be "positive identification" and is among the most compelling forms of evidence that can be entered in a court of law.
On the other hand, those who are unable to recognize faces are considered severely handicapped, as is the case for many persons with Alzheimer's Disease.
Tacit knowledge is part of everything that we do and say, and as it is inherent in our very thinking, it is deeply embedded in the way that we work. When you ask someone to describe what they do, whether it is a task at the office, the manufacturing plant, or in the kitchen at home, their best attempt at a description will most likely be incomplete. What will be missing, of course, is the important tacit knowledge.
It is tacit knowledge that enables us to recognize the correct "feel," the right way to hold and use a hammer, a kitchen knife, or the controls of the F-117 as it shakes in a turbulent airflow. It is tacit knowledge that is critical to producing a desired outcome when the task is complex. Hence, we recognize that tacit knowledge is involved in a task when we are reduced to trying to explain the "feel'" of something, particularly the way that it feels when it feels "right." In many cases, this feel eludes all of our attempts to describe it, and so success in tacit domains comes, ultimately, to a matter of doing it.
Only after you have done it will you know what it feels like, and perhaps only after you have done it repeatedly will you know how to get it to feel just right, especially when you can't specifically define what "just right" is.
Among the three components of knowledge, information tends to be explicit, but as we rarely take the time to reflect back and bring all of the elements of our activities into full awareness, most experience is tacit. Hence, a Ford engineer notes that, "When people look at a car in the showroom, the first thing they do is open and close the doors. They may not even realize it, but if they don't like the sound, they'll just walk away from the car." Knowing this,. Ford and its competitors now engineer the sounds a car makes, including doors, latches, and of course engines.
The distinction between tacit and explicit knowledge is well expressed by David Pye in his discussion of the difference between design, which is explicit, and workmanship, which is tacit: "Design is what, for practical purposes, can be conveyed in words and by drawing; workmanship is what, for practical purposes, can not. ... The intended design of any particular thing is what the designer has seen in his mind's eye: the ideally perfect and therefore unattainable embodiment of his intention. The design which can be communicated - the design on paper in other words - obviously falls short of expressing the designer's full intention, just as in music the score is a necessarily imperfect indication of what the composer has imaginatively heard."
The intended design and the workmanship used in its pursuit are within the tacit domain, while the words and drawings are explicit, and as Pye suggests, often insufficient.
Another expression of the same idea is offered by David Packard, who notes simply that, "Written instructions are seldom adequate."
As tacit knowledge plays a critical role in the definition of what constitutes workmanship, it also plays a critical role in a customer's definition of what constitutes value. However, since tacit knowledge exists in an inexpressible form, it does no good to ask customers to explicitly state what they want because they probably can't tell you much about their tacit sensibilities.
So while the quest for innovation is directed towards providing new value for customers, those very customers are usually unable to express the factors that constitute the value that they require. The implications of this are fundamental for marketing, product development, research and development, and indeed for all of the activities that constitute management and innovation.
This means, for example, that market research conducted in the traditional way using focus groups and interviews with customers is likely to keep the innovation in the domain of existing experience and block the search for discontinuities. "Standard market research techniques - focus groups, questionnaires, telephone research - are extremely weak ways of predicting how people might behave with a product they barely understand." Because these methodologies do not enable potential customers to actually experience new technologies, they have no tacit experience of what the true value could be.
While such research uncovers what customers already know based on experiences that they have already had, this is likely to be irrelevant to the use of a breakthrough product or service. Hence, in 1876 an internal memo at Western Union proclaimed that, "This 'telephone' has too many shortcomings to be seriously considered as a means of communication. The device is inherently of no value to us." Lacking the context that comes only with experience that they had not had, the utility of the telephone was not recognizable.
Similarly, before Fred Smith founded Federal Express, his university management professor rejected the idea with the comment that, "The concept is interesting and well-formed, but in order to earn better than a 'C,' the idea must be feasible."
And when the Saturn automobile was being designed, market researchers queried focus groups about nearly every aspect of the car's design. At the time, customers said that they preferred the accepted standard, motorized seat belts that engaged automatically when the car was started. Soon after this research was completed, however, air bags accompanied by manually operated safety belts became widely available and immediately became the dominant design.
The Saturn designers then realized that their market research had led them to an incorrect decision. They had not created a research context in which a future technology, the airbag, could be understood, so their research overlooked the tacit and as yet unrecognized demand for airbags.
In addition, there were operational problems with motorized belts that the Saturn designers had not recognized, which caused neck and head injuries to some users. It took two years before the error was corrected and airbags installed.
Unfortunately, the story does not end there. Only after airbags were installed in more than 60 million cars did the evidence emerge to suggest that airbags may cost lives as well as saving them. The standard airbag design is intended to protect a 165 pound man, but it has proven lethal to smaller individuals, including at least 85 children and small adults.
In hindsight, it is clear that the product was forced into mass production before being fully tested. "The air bag became an all or nothing experiment with the American driver as the guinea pig." This shows that there is no substitute for a rigorous innovation process, and that assumptions can only be confirmed through extensive real world testing, as we will discuss in greater detail in chapter 8.
In contrast with the Western absorption in explicit knowledge, many Asian cultures reflect a refined appreciation of tacit knowledge. In particular, many Japanese companies have applied a profound grasp of tacit knowledge to their use of the learning curve in the development of leading products in consumer markets throughout the world.
By recognizing and exploiting the implications of new technologies to address new, unrecognized, or unmet needs, Japanese companies have produced many product breakthroughs using technology that originated in the West. For example, the basic technology of the transistor was invented in California in the 1940s, but the transistor radio was commercialized by Sony before American and European manufacturers did so because Sony Chairman Akio Morita identified a new market for portable radios whose unmet needs the existing radio manufacturers had not recognized. Sony's product immediately became the dominant design, as did its Walkman thirty years later.
During the 1960s, the technology of video recording and playback using modular cassettes was developed in the U.S., but a successful product never materialized despite many attempts to do so. The designers never understood the tacit requirements of users and the controls they provided were too complicated. However, a Japanese company, JVC, persisted in the development process and after 20 years produced the system that was quickly accepted as the dominant design in the market because it was user-friendly (enough) to attract a following. The same design still dominates today.
Success at creating new dominant designs depends to a significant degree upon discovering new tacit knowledge, and then transforming it into an explicit form so that an innovation team can discuss it, refine it, and apply in their work. Through iterations of hands on experimentation and analysis in the research phase of early and rapid prototyping, fuzzy uncertainty is progressively eliminated and the innovation process is properly targeted.
To visualize how tacit and explicit knowledge are shared and transformed, Japanese professors Ikujiro Nonaka and Hirotaka Takeuchi developed a matrix that describes the transitions between tacit and explicit forms.
Figure 3.10 - Tacit and explicit knowledge
- The upper right quadrant shows that when tacit knowledge is made explicit it is externalized, made manifest in spoken words, writings, or tangible objects. Researchers seek to do just this, rendering the hidden tacit forms explicit and therefore applicable in the innovation process. Explicit knowledge is made tacit when it is internalized through experience. A pilot reads the F -117 instruction manual and then flies the aircraft to develop a feel for flight that cannot be expressed. Through such experience, the descriptions in the manual are translated into an appreciation of the actual flight characteristics of the plane. The matrix also shows that tacit knowledge can be shared from one person to another without being made explicit, the process of socialization that is used in advertising to convey social meanings that are powerful even as they are intended to remain at the unconscious level. In the fourth quadrant, combination occurs when explicit knowledge is shared and integrated through learning.
- Just as the advance of knowledge is represented in the path to wisdom as an iterative spiral, Nonaka and Takeuchi point out that as knowledge moves through an organization or a society, it often moves from one quadrant to the next as indicated by the spiral that connects the four quadrants. Until knowledge is represented in all four quadrants, it is not thoroughly embedded in the reality of the society, and the learning process is therefore incomplete.
Individuals do the same thing when we become conscious of new facets or dimensions of our own experience. In extreme cases, we may develop awareness of the vast amount of knowledge that is being processed in our minds at any given time.
For example, Craig Breedlove builds rocket-powered cars in quest of the land speed record, but often the outcome is not what he wanted. In 1965, his Spirit of America crashed at 620 miles per hour, but Breedlove emerged unscathed from the wreck and immediately spoke about what had transpired during his failed test run. He remarked, "It's amazing how much information you actually pull in and how much you can pull back. It's the kind of thing where you can have your attention interrupted for just an instant and miss some type of data input, a market or location. At the speed that the vehicle's going, that could be a fatal mistake." It took Breedlove 93 minutes (5 ,580 seconds) to account for what happened in the 8.7 seconds of the test run, indicating just how mush is going on in our minds at any given time that we are dimly aware of, or not aware of at all.
One way to overcome these limitations (without racing cars at hundreds of miles per hour) is to establish teams of people to work together in communities that share critical knowledge.
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