Tacit Knowledge: Definition, 12 Examples and How to Capture It

Every team has a person who "just knows". They know which customer needs a phone call before an invoice goes out, why the month end report needs one manual correction, and which supplier is always late in December. None of that is in a manual. It sits in their head, and it leaves with them.

This guide explains what tacit knowledge is, how it differs from explicit and implicit knowledge, what it looks like in an ordinary company, and how to capture as much of it as possible before someone moves on.

What is tacit knowledge?

Tacit knowledge is knowledge that people use in their work without being able to fully put it into words. It comes from experience: years of handling the same customers, machines, systems and exceptions. The philosopher Michael Polanyi described it in The Tacit Dimension (1966) with a simple sentence: "we can know more than we can tell".

Typical signs of tacit knowledge:

• It is personal. It belongs to a person, not to a system or a folder.
• It depends on context. It is tied to a specific team, product, customer base or history.
• It shows up in action. You see it when someone makes a decision quickly and correctly, not when you ask them to describe their job.
• It is rarely written down, often because the person no longer notices that they know it.

In business writing you will also see the terms tribal knowledge, experiential knowledge and know how. They all point to the same problem: important knowledge that lives in people rather than in documents.

Tacit, explicit and implicit knowledge compared

Knowledge management usually separates three kinds of knowledge. The lines between them are not sharp, but the distinction helps when you decide how to capture something.

Is implicit knowledge the same as tacit knowledge? In everyday use the two terms are often used as synonyms, and you will find both in the literature. The practical difference: implicit knowledge can be made explicit by asking the right question. Tacit knowledge can only be partly put into words, so you need examples, stories and observation as well.

12 examples of tacit knowledge in a company

Tacit knowledge is not limited to craftsmen or surgeons. Every office job has it. These examples come from roles that small and mid sized companies have in almost every team:

1. Accounting: knowing which cost centre is regularly booked wrong and how to correct it before the monthly close.
2. Sales: sensing in a call that a customer is about to cancel, and knowing which offer keeps them.
3. Customer service: recognising from the wording of a ticket that it is urgent, even if it is not marked that way.
4. Purchasing: knowing that a certain supplier always delivers late before Christmas and ordering two weeks earlier.
5. IT administration: knowing that the old server needs a restart after every Windows update, or the scanner stops working.
6. Project management: knowing who really decides on a customer's side, even though somebody else signs.
7. Production: hearing from the sound of a machine that a part will soon fail.
8. HR: judging in an interview whether a candidate will fit into a specific team.
9. Marketing: knowing which tone works for which customer group, and which words the legal team will reject.
10. Management assistance: knowing which requests the managing director wants to see personally and which they never want to see.
11. Logistics: knowing which delivery address needs a call in advance because the gate is only open in the morning.
12. Software development: knowing why a strange piece of code must not be "cleaned up", because it handles a special case of one large customer.

Notice that several of these could be written down in a single sentence once someone asks. That is the implicit part. Others, like hearing a machine or reading a customer's mood, can only be passed on by describing real situations and practising together.

Why tacit knowledge matters

As long as the team stays the same, tacit knowledge is an advantage. It makes experienced people fast and reliable. It becomes a risk the moment someone leaves, retires, goes on long leave or changes role.

What companies typically notice afterwards:

• The successor needs much longer to become productive, because they have to rediscover exceptions that were solved years ago.
• Old mistakes come back: wrong bookings, missed deadlines, a customer who suddenly feels neglected.
• Colleagues are interrupted again and again, because they are the only remaining source of answers.
• Decisions lose their history. Nobody knows why something was set up a certain way, so it is changed and breaks.

How large the damage is depends on the role. If you want a rough number for one specific person, our knowledge loss calculator estimates the cost of onboarding time, errors and lost hours.

How tacit knowledge is transferred: the SECI model

The best known model comes from Ikujiro Nonaka and Hirotaka Takeuchi (The Knowledge Creating Company, 1995). It describes four ways in which knowledge moves between people:

1. Socialisation (tacit to tacit): learning by working side by side, for example in an apprenticeship or by shadowing a colleague.
2. Externalisation (tacit to explicit): putting experience into words through conversations, examples, metaphors and questions.
3. Combination (explicit to explicit): bringing documents together, for example into a handbook or a process description.
4. Internalisation (explicit to tacit): the successor reads, applies and practises until the knowledge becomes their own.

For handovers, externalisation is the critical step. Socialisation would be ideal, but it needs weeks of overlap that most companies do not have when someone hands in their notice.

How to capture tacit knowledge before someone leaves

Asking a departing employee to "write everything down" rarely works. They do not know what others need, and the things that matter most feel too obvious to mention. These methods work better:

1. Ask about real situations, not about the job description

Questions like "What do you do?" produce a job description. Questions about concrete situations produce knowledge: "Tell me about the last time the monthly close went wrong. What did you do?" or "Which customer would you call first if you came back after two weeks of holiday, and why?"

2. Follow up until the "why" is clear

The first answer is usually the official process. The useful part comes with the second and third question: "Why do you do it that way?", "What happens if you don't?", "Who else knows this?"

3. Collect exceptions, workarounds and warning signs

Regular tasks are often documented somewhere. The exceptions are not. Ask explicitly: "What goes wrong regularly?", "What do you check that nobody asked you to check?", "Which signs tell you that something is about to go wrong?"

4. Record contacts with context

A contact list with names is not enough. What helps is "Ms Weber in purchasing approves any change to delivery dates. She prefers a phone call to an email."

5. Let the successor work along, if there is time

Shadowing and doing a task together while the experienced person watches is still the best way to pass on the part that cannot be put into words. Even two or three sessions on the most critical tasks help.

6. Write it down in a structure the successor can use

The result should be a document organised by tasks, projects, contacts, tools and risks, not a transcript. Our free handover document generator gives you that structure.

Common mistakes when capturing tacit knowledge

• Starting too late. The last week is full of farewell meetings and unfinished work. Start as soon as the departure is known.
• Only collecting files. A folder of documents shows what exists, not how and why it is used.
• One long meeting. Three hours of talking without a structure produce notes that nobody can use later.
• No owner. If nobody is responsible for the handover, it ends up as a blank document on the last day.
• Treating every workaround as a rule. Some habits are outdated. Ask why they exist before you write them down as the process.