Most organisations don’t misunderstand knowledge.
They misunderstand where learning actually happens.

One of the most common assumptions is this:

If we can capture it, we understand it.

This is where many knowledge initiatives go wrong.

Ikujiro Nonaka and Hirotaka Takeuchi did not describe knowledge as something to be captured (Nonaka & Takeuchi, 2007).
They described it as something to be created — through the ongoing interaction between tacit and explicit knowledge.

And crucially:

Externalisation is not the end of the process.

Externalisation is where we:

• articulate ideas,
• build models,
• write procedures,
• and document insights

It gives us something to share.

But it is always:

• Partial.
• Provisional.
• Shaped by context.

It is not truth.
It is a hypothesis made visible.

The real work happens next.

• Combination connects ideas into systems,
• and Internalisation turns those systems into capability through use, reflection, and experience

Without this:

• models remain theoretical,
• procedures become mechanical,
• and knowledge never becomes judgement.

This is where the breakdown occurs.

Many organisations:

• stop at documentation,
• treat articulation as completion,
• and measure success by what has been written, not what has been learned.

SECI collapses at Externalisation.

As Michael Polanyi reminds us:

We know more than we can tell (Polanyi, 1966).

What is written down is always incomplete.
What matters is what becomes internalised and applied.

When Externalisation is treated as the end:

• knowledge becomes static,
• learning becomes performative,
• and organisations accumulate artefacts instead of capability.

Externalisation makes knowledge visible.
Internalisation makes it real.

If it hasn’t changed how people think or act,
it isn’t knowledge.
It’s documentation.

Nonaka, I., & Takeuchi, H. (2007). The knowledge-creating company. Harvard business review, 85(7/8), 162.

Polanyi, M. (1966). The Tacit Dimension (Edition 2009 with a new forward by Amartya Sen). In: Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press.