Arnold Consultancy

"It's as easy as riding a bicycle" was always an expression which irritated me when I was younger. Because if there was one thing at which I was no good at all – and in fact there were lots – it was riding a bicycle. This inability was clearly not suffered by the majority of people, and particularly those who used the phrase, for whom riding a bicycle was as easy as falling off a log - which as it happens I could do. So I asked them how they did it. What was it about my technique which made participation in the Tour de France an ambition firmly shut behind the door of destiny? And what they concluded was that I was making the mistake of repeatedly falling off. Yes, but why? I persisted. And they didn’t know. They could not explain how to ride a bicycle. You get on and you maintain your balance and you … Ah, yes but how do you maintain your balance? And in the end it comes down to “Well, you just do.”

How does a successful soccer player or basketball player do it? How does David Beckham keep making inch-perfect crosses from the right wing into the penalty box, even at the age of eighty seven? How did Magic Johnson keep getting into those unlikely positions, and how did he hang in the air while he scored? They could try to explain to us lesser mortals, but in the end it would come down to “Well, you just do.”

The word we are looking for is, clearly, talent. There is something special about Beckham, Johnson, and people who can ride bicycles. In the business world, how did Jack Welch take GE from where he found it to where he left it? His book tells us many of the secrets and the tenets by which he worked, but that does not mean that the rest of us can read it, then go out and be the next Jack Welch. The man had talent.

At a lower level, if I can put it that way, there is something special about an IT project manager who can provide an accurate estimate of the cost and duration of a particular computer project early in its development. Most managers will not be able to map out the full project life cycle with that degree of accuracy which is demanded by the sponsor and steering committee. Most people, at some point during this life cycle, will lost their balance and fall off. But there are some people who are adept at doing so, and it has to be accepted that this too is a talent. It is not one which commands the same remuneration as that afforded to the peculiar talents of a Beckham, Johnson, or Welch, but it is one which is just as far beyond the ken of the average person.

In a typical company, the knowledge of how accurately to estimate an IT project is something which is constantly sought. All pointers to it are captured in manuals detailing How We Do It Here. But at the end of the day it is a talent which cannot be captured or explained. Some of it may be put down to luck, but that doesn’t help either. Whatever the label applied, it is ‘tacit’ knowledge. There is no formula which can slavishly be followed to produce the same level of accuracy time after time regardless of who is doing the math. If there were, then it would be explicit knowledge. It would be a fact, or a collection of facts. If there is relevant stuff you can know about a topic, be that a customer, a product, a project, or whatever, and which you can then apply in order to carry out an activity within a business process, then you have a piece of explicit knowledge.

The difference between tacit and explicit knowledge is often described as that between ‘know-how’ and ‘know-what’. If there is a ‘what’, a piece of knowledge that can be described in the form of capturable data, then it is explicit knowledge. But tacit and explicit are twain which shall never meet. You can spend millions - and many companies do - on databases and data-mining tools which would send the seven IT dwarfs green with envy, and still you will not be able to make tacit knowledge available to anyone who does not happen to have it naturally. You will not be able to convert know-how to know-what. Or so is the accepted wisdom.

In some instances, that accepted wisdom is certainly right. If something simply cannot be explained – if it is a talent – then it cannot be taught to someone who does not possess it. But there is a realm of tacit knowledge – a part of ‘know-how’ – which does not quite fall into that category, but which is often lumped together with it. The realm comes under the general heading of ‘experience’, but we will argue that this is really learned knowledge. And if it can be learned, it can be transferred.

People learn things over time. Much as some try not to, you can’t help it. If you perform the same task over a long period of time, you will find out different ways of doing it. You will discover pitfalls, short cuts, good ideas and bad, you will have insights and you will ‘pick things up here and there’. You will, simply, gain knowledge.

But you can’t teach that to others, people will say. ‘It comes from years of experience’. Almost invariably, the people who do say that are the ones with the years of experience already behind them, and the feeling that they have something special to protect, like their position in the hierarchy, or their job.

And they are wrong, because you can teach it. Consider a company which is constantly looking to open new stores. In order to decide where and whether to do so, they must make an estimate of sales. There are many things which affect sales – the population, the demographics of that population, the ease of getting to the store and of stopping once you are there, the other things which are available to do in the surrounding area, the presence of competing stores, and so on and so forth. Yet a company which seeks to forecast its sales in, say, just the first year of operation, always has trouble doing so. There is no magic formula into which you can plug a set number of factors and, hey presto, out pops an accurate assessment of sales. Because there is always the X factor. Or more likely the X, Y, Z and any number of other factors which will also affect first year performance.

In a particular multinational company which performs these estimates on a very regular basis some estimators are more accurate than others. And the reason they give for their accuracy? Experience. They have been doing it for a number of years, and they know the sort of things to look for. Something different about a site will make them revise an estimate upwards or downwards. They do not get it right all of the time, and sometimes they are well off the mark, but they have a higher success rate in terms of deviation between estimate and sales than their peers. Experience. You can’t teach it. You have to do the job for a number of years and learn little by little.

What you can do, though, is short-circuit the learning period. Experience can be gained at an accelerated rate. Each time one of the estimators from this company does notice something different, something out of the ordinary, a factor which stirs that gut feeling, he or she will make a note of it on a central database which is available to other estimators. Where, formerly, another little bit of know-how was stored in a corner of the estimator’s memory to be dredged up the next time the same factor or phenomenon was evident or suspected, now that knowledge is stored in an accessible corner of the database. Now any of the estimators can call upon it. Now, every one of the estimators can gain that little bit of experience from the one manifestation of the influencing factor.

We are not saying that all gut-feel in this case is transferable knowledge. There may be a talent for predicting first year sales, and that should not be equated with experience. Too often, experience is simply written off as inaccessible. Whether in the exact words or not, it is classed as tacit data, as ‘know-how’, never able to be passed from one person to another. This is a mistake, just as it is a mistake to try to capture actual tacit knowledge, of the ‘talent’ sort.

At the one end of the scale we have tacit knowledge, and at the other we have explicit knowledge, but in the middle is that realm of learned, or transferable, knowledge. It is made up of people’s experiences, of incidents which happen to them, of anecdotes which can be recorded and which provide insight. All of these things, and others, make up what we term ‘experience’. It is life experience, if you like. It is this which some people claim as their own personal ‘tacit’ knowledge, and which they use to qualify themselves as ‘specialists’. But the distinction has to be made.

It may be the case that some items from the region of transferable knowledge become explicit knowledge in their own right. They ‘become’ hard and fast facts. For example, in the case of the multinational company’s estimators, it may be that some items in the ‘learned knowledge database’ are found to be sufficiently important statistically to form part of the explicit knowledge equations which provide base estimates. Other items will remain in that more tenuous domain where people can call on them if they will. This learned transferable knowledge will form part of what they then refer to as their own experience. While it may be difficult to spread it around in less than real time, it is possible, and that possibility should at least be explored. But in lumping tacit and transferable knowledge together, and thereby ignoring what it is possible to disseminate, an opportunity is lost.

When determining your Knowledge Management strategy, you must determine what explicit knowledge - what information - you need to carry out each activity in your business processes. You must try to determine what transferable knowledge would assist in the completion of those activities. Software can then be considered to deliver the explicit knowledge and to facilitate the dissemination of the transferable knowledge.

You must also determine where tacit knowledge plays a part in what you do. It may be vital to your success, but no amount of sophisticated data warehousing or digitisation will capture it. You can buy talent, but it won't come in a box.