David Weinberger's Intranet Buzz:
Knowledge Management and the Power of the Unstated

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[NOTE: Although it may not seem like it at first, this column is actually about Knowledge management.]

Here's a poem by John Updike that you can read in his anthology "Collected Poems 1953-1993" (Alfred Knopf) www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0679762043/.

Hoeing

I sometimes fear the younger generation
will be deprived
of the pleasures of hoeing;
there is no knowing
how many souls have been formed by this
simple exercise.

The dry earth like a great scab breaks,
revealing
moist-dark loam --
the pea-root's home,
a fertile wound perpetually healing.

How neatly the great weeds go under!
The blade chops the earth new.
Ignorant the wise boy who
has never rendered thus the world
fecunder.

As with many poems worthy of the name, this poem shows the magnificence of the unthought. The simplest of productive acts, hoeing, turns out to be richer than we'd (and weed) expected.

And yet, the poem is explicitly concerned about the passing of this act. The poem says that our history has ruptured; the generations before us have hoed, and the new generation hasn't. It's taken an important change to bring about this little change; this is the context the poem assumes. Given this rupture, it seems that Updike is set on preserving the meaning of the act for a time when his generation has passed. But in so doing, Updike destroys the simplicity of the exercise. Will hoeing be the same for us after reading the poem? Now that it stands revealed as a complex act that shows the depth of our relationship to the earth, can we ever just hoe again?

For example, I'd never explicitly thought of hoeing as wounding the earth. Yet I recognize that as an accurate description of what I'd already been experiencing -- the ripping of the earth's "skin," the black decay beneath, the certitude that the tear will be healed one way or another. We see in the cut of the hoe how this activity is essentially different from that which is replacing it: the plunder of the earth by mechanical industries that are heedless -- and disruptive -- of the rhythm of renewal.

Updike makes all this explicit in the plunge and twist of the hoe, the simplest of implements. And in making it explicit, he changes the "exercise" he is describing.

Now *that's* tacit knowledge!

The tacit knowledge of KM isn't like this. Tacit knowledge, according to KM, is the know-how that differentiates the best support people from the rest. This know-how isn't transformed when it's made explicit: when Mary tells Carla how to get the XP200 hooked up to the crosswise framalator, she's only putting into words actions she's performed a hundred times (but which somehow never made it into the technical documentation). Precisely because it can be made explicit without transforming the act it's informing, KM's tacit knowledge isn't as rich or important as the poem's.

But consider how tacit knowledge is transferred outside of electronic KM systems. Mary takes Carla out on the road. Carla watches what Mary is doing, while Mary makes occasional comments ("Gotta be careful with the XP200 -- that baby'll blow if you don't tamp down the framalator!") and answers questions. Carla absorbs the tacit context, not just the tacit instruction set. The context is so close that it may entirely escape notice. The context Carla absorbs has to do with the speed at which Mary works, how frequently she consults the documentation, how much experimentation she does ("Let's try it set to 500"), how long she probes before she proposes, the tools she lays out before she even opens the faulty machine, how stuck she has to be before she'll call for help, how much she respects her colleagues and hates her boss.

Likewise, when I teach my daughter how to hoe, the instructions are so simple that I probably don't have to verbalize them -- stick in the blade, pull it back as if you're kneading dough, chop, stick it in again. But the context includes the fact that we're doing this during non-work time, that I'm whistling, that I enjoy killing weeds, that I'm bothered by slicing worms, that I find it boring after the first five minutes. The context goes to the meaning of the work and its connection to other exercises: planting, weeding, watering.

Yes, Mary is a good service person because she knows a heck of a lot about the XP series of machines. But that knowledge won't be of use if the rest of the context isn't there. Making Carla into a good service person does not simply mean transferring implicit knowledge from one head to another. It means that Carla is absorbed into the context as successfully as Mary. Updike's "Hoeing" teaches us that making contextual knowledge explicit can actually transform the context, not always in productive ways.

So, if KM is serious about making tacit knowledge explicit, it ought to be aware that there's a price to be paid. A lesson of "Hoeing" and of so much poetry, from Horace to Joyce, is that there is magnificence in the simple ... and that, therefore, the explicit is the insignificant tip of the tacitly significant.

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The Author

David Weinberger writes JOHO and is one of the Ringleaders of cluetrain.com, a manifesto of web ethics. He also provides strategic marketing consulting to high-tech companies, writes for several magazines (including Wired) and is a commentator on NPR's "All Things Considered." He was, as VP of Strategic Marketing, one of the shapers of Open Text's intranet strategy. David sits on several conference boards and is a member of AIIM's Emerging Technology Advisory Group. Reach him at self@evident.com.