See also – Wikipedia – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tacit_knowledge
Tacit knowledge is all the knowledge that cannot be written down and formally transmitted and learnt by other people from such writings, instructions, procedures or rules. It seems a trivial point but is far-reaching. Language is a tacit knowledge – children learn to speak it, but adults have to be given grammar lessons for a foreign language, and yet the child native speaker would not know what a noun or a verb or a clause was and don’t need to.
Engineering and Energy policy all involve the acquisition and use of important tacit knowledge and this point has been widely ignored by successive governments who use undoubedly clever people, but without the relevant tacit knowledge to make policies these can create unexected problems.
The Claverton Network is a store of tacit knowledge, which can be accessed by being part of the network – it is existing in the dialogues between experts.
One of the reasons learning to ride a bike is so hard, is that in fact, in order to turn left, say on a bike, you actually have to counter intuitively first turn the bars slightly to the right, which tilts the bike, over to the left, and only then do you turn the bars left. Very few people know this piece of formal knowledge, although those who can ride a bike have clearly picked up the tacit knowledge, but it doesn’t stop them riding a bike, and it wouldn’t help their children learn to ride the bike if they were told this.
Even learning algebra as Professor Harry Collins has shown in his classic paper “Collins, H. M., (1974) `The TEA Set: Tacit Knowledge and Scientific Networks’, Science Studies, 4, 165-186.” has shown involves tacit knowledge – “X is the unknown, but is it the same unknown on Wednesday or Thursday, does it matter if it is written as “x” or “X”, or if it is written in chalk or printed in a book? There are whole list of tacit rules that cannot actually be written down. but can be learnt by doing algebra under instruction”
Collins also showed how tacit knowledge is vital in say the building of a certain type of laser – even when the originating lab tried to tell other labs in absolute detail how to do it, they couldn’t – the originators actually had to visit them and do it themselves because there were things they were doing – very technical things, which they were not aware of and could not therefore articulate.
Tacit knowledge also comes into designing atomic bombs: Tacit Knowledge, Weapons Design, and the Uninvention of Nuclear Weapons Donald MacKenzie and Graham Spinardi The American Journal of Sociology, Vol. 101, No. 1 (Jul., 1995), pp. 44-99 (article consists of 56 pages) Published by: The University of Chicago Press
When the US restarted its atom bomb building programme, although it had all the books, blueprints and designs, the new guys couldn’t do it, and they had to get the old boys out of retirement to tell them how.
Tacit knowledge clearly also applies to our field of trying to work out what to do in Energy….to come to correct policy decisions also involves a lot of tacit knowledge and this can only come from dialogue with other practitioners, and this is what we see being transferred invisibly in all the Claverton dialogues.
Implications for UK Governance
It can be plausibly argued, that the failure to understand this very basic issue – tacit knowledge, and to design knowledge networks, that either are in government or feed into it, explain the poor state of many of our public services, and a number counter productive decisions and policies implemented in the UK. One can make a strong case to explain the decline of UK after the war on this issue.