These are two interdependent forms of knowledge: one that can be documented and shared through artefacts, and one carried in experience, judgement, practice, and context.
Explicit knowledge is information made visible in accessible formats such as words, documents, procedures, diagrams, models, checklists, standards, reports, data models, training materials, or other artifacts.
Tacit knowledge resides in experience, judgment, intuition, practice, skill, and context, making it difficult to fully document because it is embedded in actions like doing, noticing, sensing, interpreting, and responding.
These two forms of knowledge are interconnected rather than opposites. Explicit knowledge provides visibility, structure, and shareability to tacit knowledge, while tacit knowledge imparts meaning, judgment, context, and practical application to explicit knowledge.
A document may exist without being understood. A model may exist without being socially internalised. A procedure may exist without being followed well. A definition may exist without shared meaning. Explicit artefacts can survive long after the experience, conversations, assumptions, arguments, and judgments that gave them meaning have disappeared.
This is why knowledge management cannot be reduced to documentation.
Why It Matters
Organisations often assume that if something has been written down, the knowledge has been captured. This is only partly true.
Explicit knowledge can preserve essential information, but it can also become detached from the tacit knowledge and social context that made it useful. When this happens, knowledge artefacts become shelfware: technically available, but socially dead.
A Business Capability Model, Conceptual Data Model, glossary, Source Note, diagram, or guideline is not valuable simply because it exists. It becomes valuable when people use it to clarify meaning, surface assumptions, coordinate action, challenge understanding, and learn from consequences.
The artefact matters.
But the story around the artefact often matters more.
The picture may be 10%.
The contextual narrative may be 90%.
Knowledge as Movement
The SECI model describes knowledge creation as a movement between tacit and explicit knowledge.
Tacit knowledge may be shared through experience, observation, apprenticeship, conversation, and participation.
Tacit knowledge may then be externalised into words, diagrams, concepts, metaphors, models, or stories.
Explicit knowledge may be combined with other explicit knowledge to create new structures, frameworks, documents, or models.
Explicit knowledge may then be internalised through practice, reflection, application, and lived experience.
In this way, knowledge is not simply stored. It is created, shared, evaluated, renewed, and embodied.
The Risk of Dead Artefacts
Explicit knowledge can die socially even when the artefact remains.
A model may still exist in a folder, but if the people who understand its history, assumptions, arguments, and intended use have gone, much of its value has been lost.
The visible artefact is not the whole knowledge.
It is the residue of a knowledge creation process.
The diagram records where the conversation landed.
The story explains why it landed there.
Without that story, future users may see the artefact but not understand the meaning it once carried.
ASF Interpretation
In Adapt, Survive and Flourish, explicit and tacit knowledge are central to adaptive capacity.
Tacit knowledge allows people to notice weak signals, interpret situations, exercise judgement, and respond skilfully in context.
Explicit knowledge allows organisations to make meaning visible, discussable, shareable, and reusable.
Adaptive organisations need both.
They need people with deep experience, practical judgement, and contextual awareness.
They also need artefacts, models, language, and structures that help that knowledge travel beyond individuals.
The challenge is not to convert all tacit knowledge into documents. That is impossible.
The challenge is to create social and organisational conditions in which tacit and explicit knowledge continually interact.
When the Artefact and the Story Are Lost
Here is a real-life example of what happens when organisational change affects knowledge. This is not an unusual, isolated case, and I think most of us who have been in the workforce for some time will recognise the pattern. The core problem seems to be a primary focus on the transaction’s financials, with much less consideration given to softer issues such as knowledge, psychological safety, trust and relationships. The first indicator of this is the use of euphemisms, which are a key tool for diverting attention. Terms such as personnel synergies and collateral damage are used to mask reality.
A major takeover significantly affected the organisation’s knowledge networks. Before the takeover, around 50 managers collaborated to build a common data model to address crucial information management issues and provide a foundation for a new data warehouse. The model was a Shared Mental Model in the true sense. It took a series of often intense workshops to agree definitions, relationships and reference data. The result was a deep knowledge of information structures, business rules, organisational context, and how data was used across the business. Most importantly, the people concerned developed a shared language and an understanding of their business.
After the takeover, only a few of the original remained; many had gone to achieve the ‘personnel synergies’ promised to shareholders. Much tacit knowledge and experience were lost, while team mergers and new reporting lines disrupted long-standing relationships and knowledge flow.
People who had built shared understanding over the years were separated, informal networks weakened, and trusted sources of knowledge became less accessible.
The experience highlighted that organisations depend not only on formal structures but also on relationships that carry knowledge, context, and insight. Some years later, I discovered that the model had been completely lost, never to be seen again. As a result, both tacit and explicit knowledge were completely gone.
Key lessons:
- Formal structures show authority.
- Informal networks show where knowledge exists.
- Tacit knowledge often resides with people, not documents.
- Data models depend on shared understanding as much as documented definitions.
- Unless both are recognised and nurtured as valuable organisational assets, they can be lost.
Tacit knowledge is part of Social Capital, and the model itself is explicit knowledge as a core component of Human capital. The real problem is you need BOTH. Without the tacit knowledge and workshop experience, the explicit knowledge diminishes greatly in value. Conversely, the explicit knowledge helps people with the tacit knowledge to reinforce their learning and understanding.
Organisational change can quickly alter structures, but rebuilding trust, expertise, and shared understanding takes far longer.
These observations reflect my personal experience rather than a definitive assessment of any organisation.
Organisational effectiveness depends on both structure and the networks that connect people and their knowledge and experience.
In Summary
- Explicit knowledge can be documented.
- Tacit knowledge must be practiced, carried, shared, and renewed.
- Explicit knowledge helps knowledge travel.
- Tacit knowledge helps knowledge matter.
Organisational knowledge becomes powerful when artefacts, experience, context, practice, and shared meaning remain connected.
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This article connects to the broader framework:
- Ethical Domain — how constraints shape decisions
- Sensemaking Domain — how organisations interpret reality
- Relational Domain — how trust and coordination emerge
- Learning Domain — how knowledge is created and tested
- Action Domain — how intent becomes capability
To understand more on Purpose detailed Subject Areas, visit the Deep Dive section.
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