Transforming organisations

In the moment

The vast majority of successful business executives I meet have not the faintest idea about the difference between explicit knowledge that is going down in value, and tacit knowledge that is going up.

I speak for a number of Executive groups both in the UK and overseas. They are all into the idea of developing knowledge in one way or another and one of them came up with the idea of a ‘wisdom bank’. Trouble is that in a world where you can download and digest the entire Encyclopaedia Britannica why does anyone need a ‘wisdom bank’. The answer is that they don’t because banks are full of explicit knowledge – anything that can be read or downloaded or copied. In other words it’s history. And of course history has a value but why pay for it when there are so many other sources of similar knowledge?

I attended a weekend retreat with a very eminent speaker and he was busy preparing a website containing just about everything that any aspiring speaker could wish to know, except of course, tacit knowledge. He said that people would pay for this and I begged to differ. During the workshop I was presenting my keynote when Paul stopped me in full flow. He said “It’s your arm.” I asked what was wrong with my arm. He replied that “When you are depicting the flight path of the Bull’s Eye it goes from bottom left to upper right as you see it, but you have to depict it as your right to their left for the audience.”

Now that is pure tacit knowledge, you wont find it on any website, and you can’t put a price on it.

Labels: know the difference betwen explicit knowledge that is going down in value and tacit knowledge that is going up

posted by Tim @ 1:48 PM