All 2 entries tagged Tacit

Can PDSA help Tacit to Explicit?

The act of doing a Plan-Do-Study-Act cycle - is in someways turning tacit knowledge into explicit knowledge I believe, and it's an even more simple and useful way to do so.

The act of planning is already exercising your tacit knowledge, making your skills that you are good at such as your technical skills into use. Now i'm uncertain if this is just tacit-tacit or tacit-explicit, because the tacit knowledge that you have is turning into something tha'ts more physical form, with planning possibly being something you write or document to prepare yourself.

For 'Do' you have to make sure that the actions you take are based on what you plan, and this can come in many form, but essentially this can have 2 effects accroding to Nonaka's model:

1. Tacit - Tacit: because others observe what you do and learn from that

2. Explicit - this might depend on what you choose to do - if it's creating conceptual ideas and spreading it out to use with others - such as if what you planned was think of metaphors, do would be deploying it

'Study' - is where you can take the results and analyse it, which can be something like turnig explicit into explicit or explicit into tacit.

Lastly, 'act' can be when you decide to fully initiate the planned and tested solution, and ensure that this restarts again - to continuously improve - just like what the purpose of the sprial of knowlege is for - to continuously improve at a deeper level.

This is quite interesting and it just came to my head, but doing a comparative study on this might be something useful and very applicable.

Shujaat Alikhan : 11 Jul 2014 21:50 |  Tags: Explicit Kbam Knowledge Mbe Tacit |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Quality of Tacit Knowledge

Nonaka said that Tacit knowledge can be shared into another person's tacit knowledge through observation, socializing, praciticng, imitation, etc.

However, I do have doubts about this - althogh it can be developed into our know Explicit knowledge - is it at the sacrifice of the quality of that knowledge. This quality can be the effectiveness of what the original tacit knowledge was, for the initial purpose of the tacit knowledge. For instance, if I observe someone doing something which is very effective, then I use that same technqiue but for a different purpose but maybe it is not an important purpose or it is not done correctly - is this then useful knowledge?

I do understand that Nonaka might argue this as a method of knowledge creation - adapting it to one's own use - but what's the point of sharing knowledge if the initial purpose is not shared as well?

I feel that some knowledge is practiced based on a certain purpose, but how would someone else who tries to observe and learn the same tacit knowledge that was not articulated really understand what is going on?

So new knowledge is created - but what happens to the origin of that knowledge? does it end there? Yes the tacit knowledge can turn to explicit and can be more visible to everyone - but if you only rely on sharing tacit to tacit, loss of knowledge and originality or sense of purpose is also a real threat.

Shujaat Alikhan : 14 Jun 2014 21:17 |  Tags: Kbam Knowledge Mbe Tacit |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem