Tacit Knowledge

Master this essential documentation concept

Quick Definition

Undocumented, unspoken knowledge and skills gained through experience that exists in individuals' minds but is difficult to transfer or articulate to others.

How Tacit Knowledge Works

graph TD A[New Documentation Professional] --> B[Hands-on Practice] B --> C[Observation of Experts] C --> D[User Feedback Analysis] D --> E[Pattern Recognition] E --> F[Tacit Knowledge Development] F --> G[Intuitive Decision Making] G --> H[Improved Documentation Quality] I[Experienced Professional] --> J[Mentoring & Guidance] J --> C K[Team Collaboration] --> L[Knowledge Sharing Sessions] L --> M[Best Practice Discussions] M --> F F --> N[Institutional Memory] N --> O[Organizational Wisdom] style F fill:#e1f5fe style H fill:#c8e6c9 style O fill:#fff3e0

Understanding Tacit Knowledge

Tacit knowledge represents the accumulated wisdom and intuitive understanding that documentation professionals develop through years of hands-on experience. Unlike explicit knowledge that can be easily documented and shared, tacit knowledge exists in the minds of experienced practitioners and is often transferred through mentoring, observation, and collaborative work.

Key Features

  • Gained through direct experience and practice rather than formal training
  • Difficult to articulate or codify in written form
  • Highly contextual and situation-specific
  • Often includes emotional and intuitive components
  • Transferred primarily through social interaction and observation
  • Encompasses understanding of unspoken user needs and preferences

Benefits for Documentation Teams

  • Enables more effective decision-making based on experience
  • Improves ability to anticipate user needs and pain points
  • Enhances quality of documentation through refined judgment
  • Facilitates better collaboration and knowledge sharing within teams
  • Reduces time spent on trial-and-error approaches
  • Builds institutional memory and organizational wisdom

Common Misconceptions

  • Belief that tacit knowledge cannot be captured or leveraged systematically
  • Assumption that only senior team members possess valuable tacit knowledge
  • Thinking that tacit knowledge is less important than documented procedures
  • Misconception that tacit knowledge transfer happens automatically

Capturing Tacit Knowledge: From Expert Minds to Documented Processes

Technical teams often struggle to document tacit knowledge—the intuitive expertise that experienced team members possess but can't easily articulate. When subject matter experts demonstrate workflows or troubleshooting techniques in meetings or training sessions, their tacit knowledge becomes briefly visible through their actions, explanations, and decision-making processes.

However, these valuable video recordings typically end up buried in cloud storage or knowledge management systems. The tacit knowledge demonstrated in these videos remains inaccessible to most team members who need specific answers without watching hours of content. The expertise captured on video essentially stays trapped in another format.

Converting these videos into structured documentation transforms tacit knowledge into explicit, searchable resources. When an expert's screen recording showing complex system configurations or debugging techniques becomes a step-by-step guide with screenshots and instructions, you've successfully externalized tacit knowledge. Your documentation team can then enhance these AI-generated drafts with additional context, prerequisites, and related information—creating comprehensive resources that preserve expertise even when key team members are unavailable.

Learn how to transform tacit knowledge from videos into structured documentation →

Real-World Documentation Use Cases

User Experience Intuition Development

Problem

New documentation writers struggle to understand what information users actually need versus what they think they need, leading to comprehensive but unhelpful documentation.

Solution

Leverage tacit knowledge from experienced writers who have developed intuition about user behavior patterns and information-seeking habits.

Implementation

1. Pair new writers with experienced mentors for shadowing sessions 2. Conduct regular user feedback review sessions where experienced writers share their interpretations 3. Create informal discussion forums for sharing user interaction insights 4. Encourage new writers to observe user testing sessions and discuss observations with mentors

Expected Outcome

New writers develop better instincts for user needs, resulting in more targeted and useful documentation that addresses real user pain points rather than theoretical completeness.

Content Structure Optimization

Problem

Documentation teams struggle to organize information in ways that feel natural and intuitive to users, often creating logically structured but user-unfriendly navigation.

Solution

Capture and transfer tacit knowledge about information architecture and user mental models through collaborative design sessions.

Implementation

1. Host regular 'structure review' sessions where experienced writers explain their organizational decisions 2. Create templates that embed structural wisdom while allowing customization 3. Develop case study discussions around successful and unsuccessful content organization attempts 4. Implement peer review processes that focus specifically on structural decisions

Expected Outcome

Teams develop shared intuition about effective information architecture, leading to more user-friendly documentation structures and improved findability of information.

Quality Assessment Expertise

Problem

Teams lack consistent standards for evaluating documentation quality beyond basic grammar and completeness checks, leading to inconsistent user experiences.

Solution

Systematically capture tacit knowledge about quality indicators through collaborative evaluation processes and expert knowledge sharing.

Implementation

1. Create quality review checklists based on expert intuition and experience 2. Conduct group evaluation sessions where experts verbalize their quality assessment process 3. Develop scoring rubrics that incorporate both explicit criteria and experiential insights 4. Establish regular calibration sessions to align team members' quality intuition

Expected Outcome

Teams develop more sophisticated and consistent quality standards, resulting in documentation that better serves user needs and maintains higher overall quality across all content.

Technical Communication Adaptation

Problem

Writers struggle to adapt their communication style and technical depth appropriately for different audiences without extensive trial and error.

Solution

Transfer tacit knowledge about audience analysis and communication adaptation through structured mentoring and collaborative writing processes.

Implementation

1. Create audience persona workshops led by experienced writers who share their audience insights 2. Implement collaborative writing sessions where experts demonstrate their adaptation process in real-time 3. Develop feedback loops that help writers understand the impact of their communication choices 4. Establish regular review sessions focused specifically on audience appropriateness

Expected Outcome

Writers develop better instincts for audience needs and communication preferences, leading to more effective documentation that resonates with intended users and achieves better engagement rates.

Best Practices

✓ Implement Structured Knowledge Capture Sessions

Regularly scheduled sessions where experienced team members share their insights, decision-making processes, and lessons learned from specific documentation projects or challenges.

✓ Do: Schedule monthly sessions with specific topics, encourage storytelling about past experiences, document key insights in accessible formats, and create safe spaces for sharing failures and lessons learned.
✗ Don't: Make sessions feel like formal presentations, focus only on successes, skip documentation of insights, or limit participation to senior team members only.

✓ Establish Mentoring and Shadowing Programs

Formal programs that pair experienced documentation professionals with newer team members to facilitate direct transfer of experiential knowledge through observation and guided practice.

✓ Do: Create structured mentoring relationships, set clear expectations and goals, provide time for regular check-ins, and encourage both formal and informal knowledge sharing opportunities.
✗ Don't: Assume mentoring happens naturally, skip training for mentors, overlook the need for structured time allocation, or focus only on technical skills transfer.

✓ Create Collaborative Review and Decision-Making Processes

Implement review processes that encourage experienced team members to verbalize their thinking and decision-making rationale, making implicit knowledge more explicit for others to learn from.

✓ Do: Ask reviewers to explain their reasoning, document common decision patterns, encourage questions about review feedback, and create opportunities for group discussions about complex decisions.
✗ Don't: Accept reviews without explanation, skip documentation of decision rationales, discourage questions about feedback, or rush through review processes without discussion.

✓ Build Communities of Practice for Knowledge Sharing

Establish informal networks and regular gatherings where documentation professionals can share experiences, discuss challenges, and learn from each other's tacit knowledge.

✓ Do: Create regular informal meetups, encourage cross-team collaboration, facilitate discussions about common challenges, and provide platforms for sharing experiences and insights.
✗ Don't: Make communities overly formal or structured, limit participation to specific roles or levels, focus only on success stories, or neglect to provide adequate time and resources for participation.

✓ Document Decision Patterns and Contextual Insights

Systematically capture the reasoning behind documentation decisions, including contextual factors and trade-offs, to help preserve and transfer experiential knowledge.

✓ Do: Create decision logs with rationale, document contextual factors that influenced decisions, maintain accessible repositories of insights, and regularly review and update documented patterns.
✗ Don't: Document decisions without context, skip explanation of trade-offs and alternatives considered, make documentation inaccessible or hard to find, or let documented insights become outdated without review.

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