Tacit culture

When KM first started to break through in the mid 1990s nothing excited people more than tacit. Tacit knowledge. So mysterious and special … tacit knowledge.

Culture and core beliefs align very much with the tacit side of things. And so they all frequently suffer the ignominy of being dragged into the light. Cultures explained as missions, visions, value statements and the like. Tacit knowledge always seeming, in the eyes of many, to really need to be ‘outed’ and made explicit (“captured” – ugh!) in order to have some public decency. Because left alone these matters of the shadow, culture and tacit knowledge, are somehow not quite proper.

We make culture explicit in a number of ways, many of which are quite organic and natural: in signs, symbols, stories, heroes and norms of behaviour, for instance. And sometimes culture is reified in the artefacts, structures and routines of society, the ‘externalised’ side of our collective self, the expression of the ‘internalised’ collective self of culture. These expressions include rules and laws at national and international levels; policies, processes and proclamations (of, for examples, vision, mission and core values) at organisational level.

I know, for example, from decades of involvement in human rights that sometimes you really can use law to effect an outcome that may not really be the wish of the powerful: campaigners can embarrass and pressurise governments to comply with laws and treaties they have enacted, in order to enforce rights, even when, quite clearly, the powerful wished to act otherwise. Law is important – making, clear, explicit agreements is fundamental for collaboration. But this is all about acting in the ‘external’ society, and may not really indicate a change on heart in the collective culture, or the individual conscience.

We might chose to focus very much on making agreements, drawing up policies and procedures … getting people to rote learn the company values. You might. And you might be able to win some quasi-legal battles to enforce these agreements. But remember what lies beneath .. the collective mind of culture, the individual conscience. These are stronger currents.

As KMers we ought to understand the legitimacy of the unspoken remaining unspoken and of working with it in its own ways. At least we should, if only we, we who were first excited by the glimpse of tacit.