By Brant Wilkerson-New
January 21, 2025
Technical writing seems straightforward on the surface: document processes, explain systems, and create guides that others can follow, even with little knowledge of the topic at hand. Yet there’s a fascinating challenge that every technical writer faces — capturing tacit knowledge.
What Is Tacit Knowledge?
To learn which chicken eggs hold a male or a female embryo, people sit down with someone who already knows how to tell them apart. They will then start picking eggs while the person with the knowledge confirms or corrects their choice without actually explaining the differences between the two kinds of eggs. Soon, the trainee will learn how to intuitively spot each kind. This is an example of tacit knowledge.
Tacit knowledge is the type of knowledge that is not written or documented. It’s the kind of knowledge that exists around an organization and has been growing with people’s experience. The art of a good technical writer is to put into words tacit knowledge and help the organization benefit from it.
In other words, tacit knowledge is the expertise gained through personal experience but is difficult to verbalize or document. Unlike explicit skills, which can be easily written down and transmitted, effective tacit knowledge is deeply personal and rooted in experience. It’s the “know-how” that comes from doing rather than reading.
Tacit knowledge is built as a person or team works in a company, and they develop learning abilities that go beyond clear paths. It comes from experience, practice, and exchanging ideas with co-workers.
Common Forms of Tacit Knowledge in Technical Environments
Contextual decision-making
Contextual decision-making is the most common form of knowledge, where experienced team members make quick decisions about which knowledge base to use in a given situation. They often draw upon this kind of tacit knowledge, simply knowing that one solution will work better than another, based on countless past experiences.
Troubleshooting
Troubleshooting is when the ability to spot problems quickly comes from pattern recognition developed over time. Tacit knowledge is often difficult to document because it involves sensing subtle cues and making connections that might not be obvious to others.
Workflow optimization
Workflow optimizations are the third major category, where experienced users develop personal knowledge management workflows and shortcuts that make them more efficient. These optimizations may seem obvious to them but are rarely documented because they feel “natural.”
The Technical Writer’s Dilemma
Consider a senior developer who’s debugging code. They may instinctively know where to look for problems based on subtle patterns they have encountered over years of experience. This intuition, for example knowing which log files to research first or which system behaviors typically indicate specific issues, is part of their tacit knowledge. It’s a blend of experience, familiarity with processes, and involvement in the day-to-day running of a department that gives people the best practices they use every day.
But how can a technical writer put this into words?
Strategies for Capturing Tacit Knowledge
Observation
The first way to understand tacit knowledge is to shadow and observe experts at work.
Technical writers should spend time watching experts work. They should pay particular attention to what experts do, watch why they make certain choices, and ask questions about the decision-making process.
Scenarios and examples
While observing the expert at work, discussing various scenarios and examples of tacit knowledge is a great strategy: it’s a bit like how children learn about the world, and it works for adults as well. Real-world scenarios bring real-life solutions and sometimes outside-the-box results that get built on experience.
Context, not content
Have you noticed how the same sentence can have a completely different meaning depending on the context?
Tacit knowledge relies on context. When you are trying to understand the different types of tacit knowledge, you should look at what lies beyond the content. The reasoning behind a decision is as valuable as the decision itself. It shows the thought paths that a person took to reach a conclusion. The same reasoning can be used in other cases.
Storytelling
Everybody loves stories, adults included. The reason why stories can tell so much is that they hide information and context in a nice packaging. Ask experts to share their experiences dealing with specific problems and ask them to tell you the story behind their decision. This knowledge-sharing often contains valuable tacit insights about what works and what doesn’t.
How Businesses Benefit from Tacit Knowledge: The Hidden Driver of Success
Competitive Advantage
The strength of organizations is their people. Employees have tacit knowledge that can be used by the organization.
Tacit knowledge adds a competitive advantage to an organization that’s difficult for competitors to replicate because tacit knowledge is unique and belongs to those who work there.
If you manage to organize the experiential knowledge of your employees, you develop proprietary ways of solving problems and serving customers that can’t be easily copied from manuals or documentation.
Innovation and Problem Solving
Tacit knowledge can easily make systems work faster and better. For example, when a manufacturing team learns subtle machine and product maintenance techniques through years of experience, they can prevent issues before they become major problems. It’s experience, explicit knowledge, and expertise working together.
Better Decision Making
Experienced employees make better decisions because their tacit knowledge makes them view recurring patterns and intuitively understand difficult situations. For example, a sales manager may instinctively know which customer approach will work with a particular client based on countless past interactions.
Implicit Knowledge Transfer and Succession Planning
The point of harnessing tacit knowledge is that it’s useful even when someone retires or leaves. A business can transfer explicit and tacit knowledge once it has been documented and pass it on to the next generation. New employees will thus hit the ground running. For instance, pairing junior and senior employees in mentorship programs helps the transfer of unwritten expertise that wouldn’t be achieved in standard operating procedures.
Operational Efficiency
Consider a software development team that has worked together for years: during this time, they have developed shared types of knowledge and unwritten knowledge management software protocols that help them coordinate complex tasks without extensive documentation or meetings. That works at the organization level as well.
Better Customer Service
Tacit knowledge comes in handy in customer relations. Customer support representatives can handle different types of customers and situations based on past tacit and explicit experience. Customers are happy because representatives can anticipate needs and solve problems more effectively than by simply following a script. It’s the reason why we all want to talk to a representative rather than a machine.
Cultural Strength
Every organization has its own culture, and part of it is built on tacit knowledge and the development of common experiences.
When employees feel their experience-based knowledge is valued, they are more likely to share insights and contribute to collective learning. A collaborative and innovative environment always leads to better output.
Cost Reduction
When an employee already has knowledge management system expertise and knows how to adjust equipment settings or when it’s the best time to boost production, your business wins and saves money. Fewer problems and more streamlined processes mean lower costs and better profitability.
The Impact on Documentation
Technical writing needs to include tacit knowledge. Rather than simply listing steps or requirements, good documentation should include comprehensive troubleshooting sections that look into common pitfalls, provide context about when to use different approaches, document the reasoning behind technical decisions, and share expert tips and insights gained from experience.
Tacit Knowledge Is a Hidden Treasure Trove
Tacit knowledge is a big challenge for technical writers, but also a great opportunity.
Technical documentation should acknowledge the existence and importance of tacit knowledge and find ways to write it with words. That’s how technical documentation can teach and be useful by transferring expertise, not just information.
Remember, the goal isn’t to transform all tacit knowledge into explicit instructions: some things can only be learned through experience. Instead, the aim is to create documentation that helps readers develop their own tacit knowledge more quickly as they look at the context and the reasoning behind technical decisions.
If you feel your organization could benefit from technical documentation that takes into account tacit knowledge, contact us today to share your project’s goals, book a free demo, and find out how we can help. TimelyText is a trusted professional writing service and instructional design consulting partner for Fortune 500 companies worldwide.
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Exactly how I’ve told stories has changed through the years, going from writing college basketball analysis in the pages of a newspaper to now, telling the stories of the people of TimelyText. Nowadays, that means helping a talented technical writer land a new gig by laying out their skills, or even a quick blog post about a neat project one of our instructional designers is finishing in pharma.
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