Recently, I’ve done a number of hikes on very steep trails with lots of loose shale. What that really means is that the surface is very unstable and at any moment your feet can slide out from underneath you.
As I was coming back down from Carrot Mountain (picture), it occurred to me that this is an excellent example of tacit vs explicit knowledge.
When we’re first starting to hike on surfaces like this, we’re sliding regularly but it doesn’t take more than a few hours of this before we’re sliding less. Before we get to a point where we know which rocks are stable to put our weight on and which ones will slide.
And yet, even now if you were to ask me where you can step, even though I can point out the rocks that will hold my weight, I often can’t tell you how I know that. It’s not that the rocks necessarily look that different. I just know1.
This is tacit knowledge. It’s not something I learned from a book, or that someone showed me once, it’s knowledge that I absorbed through doing. In fact, it’s information that cannot effectively be learned without actual practice.
How is this relevant here? A lot of the information that we need in order to do our jobs really effectively is that tacit knowledge. It’s not something that we can learn from a book, or from a lecture. It’s something we have to do. This is why so many trainings are experiential - if you’re not actually doing the skill, you can only learn the explicit portion of it, not the tacit portion, and the tacit portion is usually the more interesting.
When I teach classes, they’re always deeply experiential. If I’m teaching development practices, we’re actually going to write code together. We’re doing to do simulations and exercises because this is how we absorb tacit knowledge. If you want to know how to not slide on the shale then come hiking with me and step where I step.
This is also the value in coaching. Not reading an article and expecting to have gained all the knowledge, but working with a coach as you’re going through the work. Getting corrections in the moment.
There are many things that you can learn from a book or a video (explicit knowledge). There are an equal number of things that you can’t (tacit knowledge), and for those you need to try something different.
I can help with that. Let’s talk.
See also: Tacit knowledge
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I don’t always know, and I slide often enough to come home scraped and bruised. The key is that I’m right surprisingly often. ↩