Tacit Knowledge: A Key to Skill Development

Tacit knowledge, knowledge that cannot be easily captured through words alone, is a vital component of skill acquisition. It exists in various fields, from bicycle riding and sports to knowledge work and surgery. People often struggle to explain the intricacies of their expertise, resorting to heuristics, exceptions, and caveats that do not fully convey their abilities.

Attempting to extract tacit knowledge from experts and turn it into an explicit set of instructions often proves difficult. Expert systems in the 1970s aimed to replace human operators with encoded expertise, but they faced numerous challenges due to the complex nature of expert knowledge.

Tacit knowledge is something that probably can only be progressively learned through imitation, emulation, and apprenticeship.