Tacit and Explicit Knowledge

In his 1995 book *The Knowledge-Creating Company*, management scholar Ikujiro Nonaka split knowledge into two kinds: **tacit knowledge** lives in the body and intuition—the feel for quoting a price, the tone that calms a client, the instinct for reading a budget. **Explicit knowledge** has already been written into text, documents, systems—price lists, SOPs, Q&A databases.

Nonaka's core insight: **an organization's competitiveness comes from a continuous cycle of converting tacit into explicit** (the SECI model). An organization that runs only on tacit knowledge experiences a knowledge earthquake with every hire and every departure. Only after knowledge is made explicit does it become "an asset of the organization" rather than "one person's memory."

The consultant who left with the pricing logic for 300 clients wasn't betraying anyone—that is simply the fate of tacit knowledge. You never gave it the chance to become explicit.