Do you like a ghost story?

It’s the story of the unspoken, the story of tacit knowledge.

For a long while after the first wave of KM broke in the 1990s, ‘tacit knowledge’ was either the or certainly one of the most spoken about ideas in KM.

Most spoken about – least sense spoken about. And, as true today as then, least done anything about.

Tacit was there as a touchstone you had to swear allegiance to along with culture and complexity and intangible value. You couldn’t be proper KM if you were all about the explicit, formal, maybe even boring stuff. You had to show your credentials with understanding tacit – – even if you had nothing sensible to say and actually did nothing much about it.

But tacit had that allure. The ghost story, the thriller, the whodunnit, the mystery. The dark matter that makes up most of the mass in the universe. It’s infinitely more sexy than the stuff written down in boring documents.

Yes, we like a ghost story. We like to hear about tacit.

Yet, paradoxically, I believe that far, far less is ever done about tacit – including by all those who declaim that this is really where KM should be at.

Well, to start at the end and before any explanation … what on earth could you ever do about tacit? It’s a hard question if you start from explicit knowledge which is so aligned to the orthodoxy. You have to start from a different place to even imagine, let alone act on, what on earth to do about tacit.

But, as I said, to start at the end with no explanation. Do this.

Become more comfortable that tacit is the form that most knowledge will ever exist in. Become comfortable with allowing that mystery and don’t even try to tame it. I think this will be hard. But try.

Get more involved with the dark side. Lose control – don’t ask for reports or measures. Experiment. Experiment and trust to tacit states – because they will see us out in any case. Get involved with how knowledge is socialised. Get involved with reflection. Observe, induce learnings from observing and help others to do so even more. Tacit lives in the things we make. Tacit lives in the reasons we made them. tacit lives in the way we made them.

Tacit lives in our cultures, sub-cultures and cults; in our rituals and stories and heroes and symbols and the reasons for them of which we’re barely aware but for which we have a sense.

Don’t fear the dark. It’s just a story, silly.