The Extended Mind: The Power of Thinking Outside the Brain

by Annie Murphy Paul

Such nitty-gritty details constitute what psychologists call “tacit knowledge”: information about how things are done, when, and under which circumstances. It’s what gets left out of the depersonalized information employees encounter in more formal meetings and training sessions. It’s also where the “knowledge management systems” in which so many firms have invested go wrong: the information such systems make available is devoid of context, stripped of detail, and thereby rendered all but useless. “Much of the knowledge needed for employees to learn and thrive at work is not the kind of formal, codified information that is typically documented in online repositories or knowledge management systems,” Myers notes. “Instead, what is often critical for success is mastery of the tacit knowledge of the organization—the complex, often subtle interpretive knowledge that is difficult to capture or write down.”