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knowledge
management
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Discovering
what we know
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Discovering what we know: tacit knowledge
| . It comes as a surprise to people, accustomed to a commonsense,
down-to-earth, let's-face-the-obvious-facts view of the world, that we are
only aware of a fraction of what we know. It is a shock to discover that
most of our knowledge remains hidden from us as tacit knowledge, and only
emerges to our consciousness when we are confronted with a question that
we have to answer or a problem that we have to solve. The phenomenon is however obvious to anyone who has ever sat down and tried to write down what he or she knows about a subject. It also explains why efforts to build websites without user inputs in the hope that "if we build it, users will come" almost inevitably come to grief. Such phenomena force consideration of the view that truth is not a natural property of the world "out there", but that our mind discovers the truth while interacting with the world. Truth is inseparable from the fact of having to say it. Truth does not precede reflection but is a result of of it. Truth is a quality of the act of speaking or writing. In whatever part of our lived experience that has not yet been spoken, there is a raw meaning, that is summoned from the depths of language. What has to be said may appear initially as no more than an uneasiness with the world as it is perceived. The expression of words frees the meaning that is captive to the feeling of uneasiness. The truth so expressed is thus not a truth that exists ready-made and to which reflection only has to conform, as one might expect from the perfectly intelligible world of formal science, but one that is created through the expression of words. It is the act of speech that completes the potential inspiration and insight when confronted with a problem or question of the external world. The meaning of the world and our existence and our knowledge of it, are not given in advance, as if the task of learning was merely to discover this given. Rather the meaning of the external world presents itself as a task to be accomplished, a challenge to create something meaningful from it. The world presents itself as a raw indication that has to be finished by interpretation to make it meaningful. The interpretation must be appropriate to the inputs, but it consists also of contributions from the interpreter. While the words so expressed in the attempt to create meaning, might in principle be either abstract or narrative, it is fact principally through storytelling, or the oral performance of narrative, that we typically discover what we know. While abstract expressions mimic what we have been told, stories reflect what we ourselves know. It is through stories that we create our own understanding of the world. By telling stories, we put together the perceived facts of the external world in a combination of time and space and human intention, that constitutes our interpretation of the world. In the process of recounting the narrative, we discover what it is that we know. |
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