The Tacit Way of Traveling

One of the best descriptions of tacit knowledge’s makeup comes from David Snowden, former director of the Knowledge and Differentiation Programme at IBM Global Services. He uses the analogy of how best to get around London’s roads: One could use a map, which contains information with which to navigate using universal symbols and structures to observe, orientate, and then decide how to move. But using the services of a cab is faster, because the driver uses his tacit knowledge compulsorily acquired over 30 prequalification months cycling round the streets of London. To this I would add the knowledge from day-to-day experience of bottlenecks and throughways.

For more tangible business illustrations of tacit knowledge’s meaning, the citation referring to the current predicament of the National Aeronautical and Space Administration (NASA) is instructive: “If NASA wanted to go to the moon again (as it is planning to do by 2018), it would have to start from scratch, having lost not the data, but the human expertise that took it there last time” (Brown & Duguid, 2000). Which is why officials at Los Alamos, where the atomic bomb was born, undertook the Knowledge Preservation Project (Los Angeles Times, 1995). In the wake of the U.S. government’s decision to stop testing nuclear weapons, there were concerns that the skills developed would atrophy, so, in the event that it had to one day resume testing, and perhaps actually use the weapon, retired weaponeers were brought back to the laboratory for video taped interviews intended to salvage knowledge about nuclear bombs that could not be gleaned from blueprints and archived documentation. Researchers recorded more than 2,000 videotapes. The rationale of John D. Immele, then-director of nuclear weapons technology at Los Alamos, was, “We don’t want to press the erase button on our memory and go back to where we were 50 years ago” (Los Angeles Times).