The tacit knowledge gain from attending a talk

Some speakers and some speeches (talks, lectures) are really good. And podcasts have been one of the big discoveries for me in the last few years (who would have thought it would take this simple idea so long to have come to anything? An audio file!). But what usually happens when I have to attend a business talk of some kind is something else.

At some point the speaker will say something that will spark a completely different thought in my head. Perhaps the opposite of what they’re saying, because it’s a habit of mine to try out the contrary idea. If the claim is “water is wet”, with which I generally agree, I’ll think “what if it wasn’t … ice! … what’s special about ice that could be interesting …” and so on, onto another track. I end up thinking about something else and once this starts there’s often a torrent of new ideas. So the notes I’m taking are the things I’m thinking about, not what the speaker’s saying.

I consider this a kind of tacit knowledge awakening or transfer. What else can explain it? Trapped in the lecture hall you can’t get on with your own stuff. There are no other nice distractions. All you can do is go internal. And the speaker is saying things that prod your mind in unexpected ways, that maybe shake you out of what you might have otherwise thought, just left to doing your own stuff some more. So it’s certainly an awakening of something that was tacit and potential in my own thoughts. Maybe it is a transfer too, though not deliberately so, of ideas and thoughts that were also at least potential in what the speaker is saying, though obscured and unthought, unspoken. And yet they transferred to me.

And no, unless there was a really important fact to remember, no, I don’t want a copy of your slides … because nothing I was thinking about is explicitly in them.