I didn’t know I had any thoughts until I let my pen go. The pen knows more than I think!
—A participant
Definition
Knowledge exists within individuals in implicit forms of which the individual is unaware: it is under- or not fully utilized and can be accessed through guided introspection.
Nick: This principle reminds me of Socrates and the maieutic, he thought people already had all the knowledge and he just had to extract it via questions.
You are right. This principle is found throughout history, with perhaps the most quoted example being Socrates’s method. We can also find it in the etymology of the Latin word “education,” educere meaning to extract, literally “to lead out” or bring out something that is already latent within the person. The First Nation indigenous group of Unangan, which has been living for over 10,000 years in what are now the Aleutian Islands, which straddle the Pacific Ocean and the Bering Sea, does not use many words to transfer knowledge to their young. The Unangan consider that their children can be led, by means of short questions, to find the knowledge and wisdom within themselves. Similarly, we find in the roots of Zen Buddhism, and other spiritual or religious traditions, invitations to individuals to find the wisdom inside themselves, rather than in external sources of authority. The underlying assumption is that the answers to a person’s questions already lie within themselves and are far more powerful or effective than those provided by others.
Nick: This sounds like the foundation of psychotherapies, too.
True. This principle has also been at the foundation of early studies of psychology (William James), psychoanalysis (Freud, Jung), and later psychotherapeutic methods: helping individuals uncover their own answers, expanding their consciousness by accessing their tacit knowledge or wisdom. Actually, the term “tacit knowledge” was first presented by Polanyi in 1958,1 and later developed by Nonaka.2 Tacit knowledge is not only an individual phenomenon, but it can also be found within a group or a community of practice,3 where people act upon a knowledge that they cannot explain easily or readily put into words.
Julia: Tacit knowledge may be valuable in dealing with our soul or behaviors, but why is the students’ tacit knowledge something important in a classroom when we know they are investing time and money to go to school in the search for new knowledge?
We can go back to the banking analogy proposed by Brazilian educator Paulo Freire.4 According to Freire, when teachers share information and expect students to receive it, memorize, and repeat it, they are acting like a bank, where deposits are made, and employees receive, file, and store them. He questions this traditional way of understanding education, reminding us that the learner is never an empty vessel, a “tabula rasa.” Children, and even more so adults, have accumulated information that shapes frameworks and mental models. This tacit body of knowledge conditions our interpretations and how we will incorporate any new information. If we stand in front of a classroom and see the students merely as empty containers to be filled with our precious information, we will be paying the price of misreading our audience. If we, instead, see the classroom as a gathering place for young people intent on active inquiry and exploring the new, we will open the space for a rich dialogue as we help them access their tacit knowledge.
Andres: I still cannot imagine how I could extract any tacit knowledge from students in, let’s say, accounting practices or any STEM disciplines (science, technology, engineering, math).
That is a good point. As we saw before, there are things that we simply don’t know. The tacit knowledge does not refer to those. It refers to what we don’t know that we know. An easy process to implement this principle is to ask questions. Before starting with a lecture or introducing a concept, the instructor can ask an open question to the audience to help them bring up what they know.
A Tool
The best way to engage everyone in accessing what they don’t know they know is a Stop Reflect Write Report.* In this process, the facilitator invites everyone to take a minute and write thoughts in response to a specific question. In any given group, there are individuals who need to reflect in silence, and others who develop their thoughts by talking (extroverts). This can create a delicate situation when we ask a question, because while the extroverts will readily give their perspective, the introverts have to decide whether to listen or to reflect, and mostly tend to listen and let others do the work. By asking everyone to write in silence during one minute, we help the extroverts edit their thoughts, and the introverts access their tacit knowledge. Then everyone can share their views, and contributions are multiplied, all in a fraction of the time it would take a group to respond to an open question without first reflecting on the replies.
Asking a question to the audience and inviting everyone to reflect is very different from a common (and unfortunate) habit that some instructors have when they ask the students to guess the end of a half sentence, such as “This approach is called … ?”—and then looking around, wait for someone to guess what is on his mind. When a few students take the risk to complete the sentence, only to fail to provide the right answer, the instructor then gives the answer himself—“This approach is called … patronizing!” This habit, albeit unintentionally, can create an atmosphere of disrespect for the students, who are reduced to mere guessers of the expert’s thread of thought. This is not a helpful way of using questions, and if we have ever been in such a situation, we know the mix of frustration and humiliation it can create. As Riane Eisler5 would say, this is a common use of overpowering and exemplifies the domination model in action.
Another way to elicit the tacit knowledge that is in the room is for the educator to resist the urge to answer a question posed by the students, and to turn the question back to the group, for them to answer. It is surprising how many rich answers emerge from this broadened source of information, and it allows the instructor to probe their rationale, ask for clarification, support evidence, and eventually complement the responses with her own experience or answers. The key here is to resist the temptation to step into the self-rewarding role of the all-knowing expert.
Vivien: Help me understand how we are developing more responsible managers by bringing out the students’ tacit knowledge.
Russ McDonald,6 a professor from the University of Auckland in New Zealand, wrote an interesting book about a course to educate for responsibility in management. He found that students need to be given the opportunity to take ownership of their learning, by defining what they would like to see in a better world, what values would make that better world, and what new behaviors would be needed to support that change. McDonald holds back on his own experience or perspective, and instead he asks plenty of questions to prompt the students to reflect, to shape their own opinions, and to present them in well-constructed statements. This requires another condition, which he describes eloquently: The creation of a safe space, where students don’t feel judged or ridiculed, but rather appreciated and stimulated in furthering their thinking. His approach is not limited however to ethics courses. Exploring the values we live by and those that would make this a better world is something embedded in any discipline, whether science, art, or humanities. Not even technology exists outside a framework of values. The big contribution of bringing out the tacit knowledge is not to fill out technical information, but rather (a) to explore existing beliefs, assumptions, and values and (b) to create a learning situation where the student is respected as a holder of valuable knowledge.
Julia: Summarizing, the principle of Tacit Knowledge means that students may know more than they think, and we can help them discover this.
Nick: Yes, and that principle has been widely present in human civilization across time and cultures—we can find the underlying assumption in philosophy, religion, spiritual traditions, and psychotherapy, even in modern-day’s coaching, if I may say so.
Andres: It may not be applicable for situations when they just don’t know. But when we think the students may have some tacit knowledge, we can ask a question and have everyone ponder over it. And resist answering the questions ourselves … .
Vivien: We may develop more self-confident individuals, who learn to trust themselves all the while testing the strength of their perspectives by sharing them with their colleagues. Responsibility is developed from the inside out, and not taught from the outside.
* SRWR: A tool developed by LIM LLC, with permission.