players how they did what they did on the chess board, how they
managed to win, what their strategy was, and so on, they could not
tell him. In other words, their knowledge of how they played the
game was tacit—below the level of conscious awareness. Simon and
his colleagues then proceeded to observe these players as they
played the game. They eventually determined the strategy that
each player used, which was unique to each player. This strategy
was an original patternof playing each game. When Simon would
describe the pattern to a player, the master would then respond
with something like, “Oh, yes; that’s what I do when playing
chess.” What the player could not articulate before now became
explicit, and the master could at last explain his or her strategy.^6
Tacit knowledge is not limited to master chess players, of
course. All of us know more than we can tell. As Joseph Horvath
puts it, “Personal knowledge is so thoroughly grounded in experi-
ence that it cannot be expressed in its fullness. In the last 30 years,
the term tacit knowledgehas come to stand for this type of human
knowledge—knowledge that is bound up in the activity and effort
that produced it.”^7 In other words, often it is difficult for us to
express with clarity what we have learned from experience and
what our intuition seems to “tell us.”
Not all tacit knowledge is necessarily worthy of being made
explicit. Although we may not be able to articulate it, the likelihood
is that we have learned some things that are, after all, stupid. It may
be best to let these lessons remain tacit. There is much, neverthe-
less, that is worth making explicit, especially for professionals.^8
For the purposes of increasing organizational learning and man-
aging knowledge more effectively, it is useful to tap into tacit
knowledge and attempt to make it more explicit. The following
four suggestions may be considered as ways to accomplish this tacit-
to-explicit transition:
- Like Herbert Simon and his colleagues, one way is to
observe people with certain valued expertise at work—to look for
patterns and strategies in how they achieve tasks, manage projects,
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