Tacit and remote

The transfer of tacit knowledge may have been one of the casualties of remote working patterns during the pandemic.

Many times in the past when I’ve heard people talk about sharing or transferring tacit knowledge between people what has been proposed involved first converting that tacit knowledge into an explicit form. I think that’s all part of the general feeling that tacit is somehow ‘second best’ to explicit, and the greater comfort many feel about something explicit and concrete that they think, consciously or subconsciously, that they can better manage and control. That’s not really tacit knowledge transfer.

But tacit knowledge transfer is very natural and happens, again, both consciously and subconsciously, when we witness or take part in something being done. We see for ourselves, even without it being explained verbally, how the person approaches a task; what order they do things in, what inputs and methods they use, what they pay careful attention to and what they gloss over. As well as this we take in their demeanour; some of this we understand as their personal character but some of this we take in through the skin, as it were, as cultural norms.

Being actually involved in the act in some role or other (assistant, customer etc) probably heightens our awareness, but even simply being present and witnessing, even in our peripheral vision, helps form our mental models.

When we’re young or when we’re novices we may well be told explicitly what the rules are: This is how to behave in church, this is what happens in the restaurant. Put your hand up, wait your turn … all that. But I think even then, and ever more so as we grow, we’re deducing for ourselves what are the norms, what are the standards, what are the processes. We know when we’re very impressed with the way someone does something and we think “that’s how I will do it from now”. We know when we’re very much not impressed and we think “I won’t make that mistake”. And all of this is tacit learning.

So it’s reasonable to think, again, based on our real-life experience, that the necessary move in many work situations to a remote style of working, during the pandemic, would likely have lessened the opportunities simply to witness other people working and to learn tacitly like that. Lessened, I’m saying, not removed altogether. Lessened, I think, because, in the main, connecting remotely for a meeting is a more deliberate act than simply being there, by chance.

Many people have recognised similar effects, which are often alluded to as a need to make sure we maintain connections when working remotely from one another. And I think the tacit knowledge transfer dimension is another need that causes us to think about making sure we allow time to connect in a less purposeful and deliberate manner simply for serendipity.

And a final word. Often I’ve witnessed in business and organisational life that, when an argument is advance either pro or contra something, a senior manager will instantly declare “Ok so we must/must not do that”. Because I say that tacit knowledge transfer may have suffered from people working remotely from each other doesn’t mean we should immediately mark that way of working as bad. It’s not the whole story. It’s one factor, and we can make a range of choices regarding what to do about it.