Explicit knowledge is easily expressed and communicated, such as book knowledge and formulas, while tacit knowledge is gained through experience and is difficult to explain. Both are important, but turning tacit knowledge into explicit often requires building rules around the topic. Explicit knowledge can also lead to the development of tacit knowledge.
Explicit knowledge is knowledge and information that can be expressed or written down and is easy for humans to communicate. For example, every time someone enrolls in a course or reads a book, he gains explicit knowledge. Visual and oral means, such as speaking or showing someone knowledge, are another example of the explicit variety. Explicit knowledge is opposed to tacit knowledge, or knowledge that is difficult to communicate. Both explicit and tacit knowledge play an important role in work and life.
When someone uses explicit knowledge, they are expressing or understanding knowledge that is easy to quantify. Book knowledge, pictures, numbers and formulas are all kinds of explicit information. This type of information is needed for everyday life because people need certain skills to work and to operate machinery such as cars and televisions.
Tacit knowledge describes information that cannot be easily explained. The most common type of tacit knowledge is knowledge gained from experience, and not from books, where the person who has the knowledge cannot articulate why they know something or even know why it is true.
While it may seem impossible, tacit knowledge and explicit knowledge often cross paths. A programmer knows how to create a program and can teach other people the same programming language, but may not understand exactly how the computer actually processes and uses the program. A painter may teach someone how to paint and mix colors, but may have difficulty teaching someone how to interpret art. Most of these tacit areas are acquired only from personal experience.
A goal of many writers, teachers, and businesses is to turn tacit information into explicit information. Creating manuals or classes on the subject does this, but there is also a conversion process. While someone may tell people about tacit knowledge, mere communication may be ineffective.
Making tacit knowledge explicit usually requires building rules around the topic. Some examples of this are professional food critics and food tasters, who know how something tastes but may struggle to put that taste knowledge into quantifiable words. To alleviate this problem, scales are used to more accurately measure the taste of food, but explicit taste understanding does not fully describe the experience associated with consuming the food.
Explicit knowledge often has rules that are broken by experience. It can also be said that explicit knowledge is the birthplace of tacit knowledge. This is because when someone learns to configure a machine or system based on rules, they find a better way to configure the same system which is not quite what the rules imply.
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