Tacit Knowledge: What It Is, Why It’s Valuable, and How to Capture It

TL;DR: 

• Tacit knowledge is the know-how your people build through experience and practice.
• It helps your teams make faster, smarter decisions in the moment.
• When employees leave, that knowledge often leaves with them.
• Learn what tacit knowledge means, why it matters, and how to capture it.
• See how Stravito helps global teams keep that expertise findable and useful.

Ever wonder why your best people make things look easy? They don’t check a manual before solving a problem. They just know what works. That’s tacit knowledge - the experience and intuition that drive confident decisions.

It’s powerful, but fragile.

Most organizations document their data and SOPs, yet lose the deeper know-how that lives in conversations, habits, and shared context.

When that happens, onboarding slows down, customer experiences suffer, and innovation stalls.

With the right knowledge management framework, you can protect this hidden advantage.

You’ll see how to define tacit knowledge in your own context, spot where it’s already driving results, and start capturing it in ways that keep your team’s unique know-how alive and useful.

Before we talk about how to manage it, let’s look at what tacit knowledge really means and where it comes from.

What is tacit knowledge?

Tacit knowledge is the know-how that lives in people, not in documents.

It’s built through experience, observation, and social connection. You can’t download it or search for it, but it’s what keeps your business running smoothly when the unexpected happens.

Tacit vs explicit vs implicit knowledge

Understanding the difference helps your teams capture both the written and unwritten parts of how work gets done. Tacit and explicit knowledge complement each other, forming your organization’s collective intelligence.

How tacit knowledge forms

Tacit knowledge grows through:

• Apprenticeship and mentoring. Learning by doing alongside experts.
• Feedback loops. Trying, adjusting, and refining over time.
• Immersion. Picking up cues and context from real situations.
• Shared norms. Adopting ways of thinking and acting within your team culture.

These experiences shape how your employees solve problems, interact with customers, and make decisions. It’s what gives your business its unique edge.

Examples of tacit knowledge

You’ll find tacit knowledge in almost every part of your company:

• Manufacturing: Operators’ sense of timing during line changeovers.
• Pharma: How teams triage signals and interpret regulatory nuance.
• Retail and CPG: Interviewing shoppers or adjusting promo execution on the fly.
• B2B sales: Reading a room or tailoring negotiation strategy.

When you understand how this knowledge works, it becomes easier to see where it hides and why it’s worth protecting.

Tacit knowledge is everywhere in your organization, but without the right systems and habits, it slips through the cracks.

To see why it deserves a place on your leadership agenda, let’s explore how tacit knowledge drives measurable performance and where it tends to hide.

Why tacit knowledge matters and where it hides

Tacit knowledge is what turns process into performance. It is the quiet force behind faster decisions, smoother handovers, and fewer mistakes.

When your teams share it freely, they build consistency without losing flexibility. That balance is something every global business struggles to achieve.

How tacit knowledge drives measurable results

Here’s how you can see its impact in real numbers.

• Faster onboarding. New employees ramp up quickly when they can access real-world examples instead of just manuals.
• Higher first-time-right rates. Teams make fewer errors because they understand the “why” behind each step.
• Shorter innovation cycles. Lessons from past launches or pilots help future ones succeed sooner.
• Lower key-person risk. Knowledge does not disappear when someone moves on.
• Better local adaptation. Markets stay aligned globally while respecting local context and culture.

These outcomes are not abstract. They show up in reduced downtime, fewer escalations, and increased productivity across departments.

Where tacit knowledge hides

You’ll find it in unexpected places.

• Shadow processes. Unwritten shortcuts that keep work flowing.
• “Black book” contacts. Relationship insights that never make it to a CRM.
• Cultural nuances. Local adaptations that make global playbooks work.
• Regulatory interpretations. Subtle know-how that ensures compliance without delay.

The challenge is not that tacit knowledge does not exist. It is that it is rarely visible or shared consistently across teams and time zones.

When you recognize the business value of tacit knowledge, capturing it becomes less about documentation and more about protecting performance.

Your next step is to turn that understanding into a repeatable process your teams can actually use.

How to start capturing and sharing tacit knowledge

You don’t need a massive project to make tacit knowledge visible. You just need a clear, simple way to collect what your teams already know and share it where others can use it.

You can use everyday tools and habits that can grow with your business.

It’s grounded in proven knowledge management strategy practices that help teams turn individual experience into shared progress.

Here are three steps you can take first:

1. Identify and prioritize what matters most

Start by focusing on the roles and processes that would be hardest to replace.

• List your high-risk areas. Think sterile line setups, seasonal promo planning, or pharmacovigilance coding.
• Map your experts. Note who holds the know-how, what they do, and how others depend on them.
• Rate the risk. Use a simple scale to track where you’d lose the most if someone left.

This step helps you capture tacit knowledge before it disappears. It creates a live view of your organization’s strengths and gaps.

2. Turn experience into shareable knowledge

Once you know what’s critical, make it easier for others to learn from it.

• Record short video walkthroughs or annotated screenshots.
• Add context blocks that show when it works, when it fails, and what to avoid.
• Attach data, SOPs, or studies to connect tacit and explicit knowledge.

As you organize this information, think about the same principles outlined in knowledge management implementation. Build from clear goals, strong ownership, and a structure that helps people find what they need fast.

AI can also help you scale this process. As explored in AI knowledge management, modern tools can summarize, tag, and connect related insights automatically while keeping experts in control of the content.

3. Keep it active and alive

Knowledge loses value if it’s hidden.

• Embed short clips or checklists into training modules or CRM playbooks.
• Share quick updates before big launches or audits.
• Assign stewards to track usage and keep examples current.

Governance keeps tacit knowledge reliable and useful. It ensures lessons stay accessible even when employees leave or new members join.

This is how continuous learning becomes part of your daily rhythm, not another initiative.

When you start small and focus on real use cases, you’ll see quick wins:

• Faster onboarding
• Better collaboration
• Fewer repeated mistakes

With AI reshaping how companies work with knowledge every day, the real question is how your business can use it to capture tacit knowledge faster without losing the human insight that makes it matter.

Responsible AI for tacit knowledge

AI can speed up how you collect and connect what people know, but it’s not a replacement for human judgment.

The goal is to use AI to make tacit and explicit knowledge work together so your experts spend more time problem-solving and less time searching.

When your teams rely too much on automation, the insight that comes from personal experience and social interactions can get lost.

Here are five clear signals that show when it’s time to bring a real person back into the loop.

5 signs you need a human touch

1. The decision feels complex or high-stakes.
   If the situation involves risk, emotion, or reputation, a machine can’t sense the nuance. Humans are needed to apply intuitive understanding that AI can’t replicate.

2. The context keeps changing.
   AI performs best with stable patterns. When customer interactions, market conditions, or team dynamics shift, experts are better at reading weak signals and filling knowledge gaps.

3. The insight depends on culture or tone.
   Tacit knowledge often hides in behaviors shaped by culture. A local manager can interpret different contexts or subtle cues that an algorithm might miss.

4. The content draws from body or craft knowledge.
   When somatic tacit knowledge or hands-on skills are involved, like assembling medical devices or running a sales team workshop, you need someone who’s lived it.

5. You’re connecting knowledge across silos.
   AI can suggest links between files, but humans can see how organizational knowledge fits together in real workflows. They know how to adapt existing knowledge to new goals.

Where AI really helps

You can still use AI to make the routine work easier. Use it to transcribe expert interviews, extract key moments from videos, and keep information visible across systems.

It can also support knowledge sharing by recommending related insights, surfacing explicit and tacit knowledge, and helping team members learn from different perspectives.

AI knowledge management is vital because it speeds up how teams capture, tag, and connect insights while still relying on experts to review, refine, and apply what matters most.

AI is a powerful assistant, not an author. When you treat it as a collaborator rather than a replacement, you’ll capture more collective tacit knowledge and make it easier to share what your teams already know.

How this looks can differ by industry, but the goal stays the same. Keep human insight at the heart of every process.

Industry examples of tacit knowledge in action

Every industry depends on tacit knowledge. It’s what turns training into intuition, rules into results, and experience into performance.

When your teams can capture and share this kind of knowledge, they move faster, adapt more easily, and keep their edge even when employees leave.

These examples show how companies across manufacturing, pharma, and retail use tacit and explicit knowledge together to improve decision-making and productivity.

Manufacturing

Why it matters: Tacit knowledge keeps production consistent, efficient, and safe. It’s the human know-how that bridges the gap between process and performance.

You’ll see it in:

• Operators sensing machine misalignment before alarms trigger
• Supervisors adjusting settings based on sound or vibration
• Teams transferring skills through demonstration, not documentation

Case in point: Reckitt

Reckitt’s insights team built a single source of truth that connected research, reports, and on-the-job expertise.

By turning practical experience into shared resources, they cut duplicated research and helped new employees ramp up faster.

The same approach aligns with knowledge management in manufacturing, where centralizing insights protects experience-based knowledge across plants and teams.

Takeaway: Capturing embodied knowledge makes production safer, training faster, and performance more consistent.

Pharma and healthcare

Why it matters: In pharma, tacit knowledge refers to expert judgment. So, how teams interpret data, assess medical risk, or handle regulatory nuance.

This technical knowledge is shaped by years of collaboration and personal experience.

You’ll see it in:

• Researchers applying intuitive understanding to clinical data
• Cross-functional teams balancing compliance with innovation
• Specialists adapting global standards to local regulations

Case in point: Roche

Roche created Brain42, a knowledge system designed to make hidden expertise discoverable while safeguarding compliance.

By combining tacit and explicit knowledge in one environment, they improved consistency and accelerated decision-making. It reflects the same principles behind pharmaceutical knowledge management, where blending expert insight and structured data drives innovation.

Takeaway: When teams can reuse proven judgment at scale, they reduce risk and strengthen compliance without slowing down progress.

Retail, CPG, and services

Why it matters: In customer-driven sectors, tacit knowledge shows up in social interactions like the instinct to read a room, shift tone, or sense what a shopper needs.

This relational tacit knowledge transforms service into loyalty.

You’ll see it in:

• Store staff anticipating customer needs before they’re spoken
• Marketing teams tailoring messages to different contexts
• Field teams sharing insights from in-person activations

Case in point: Heineken

Heineken’s global insights team used Stravito to democratize consumer understanding.

By capturing insights from interviews, workshops, and campaigns in one searchable hub, they helped employees apply experience-based learning to new markets.

This model reflects the lessons in enterprise knowledge management tips, where open access turns human expertise into a repeatable advantage.

Takeaway: Sharing customer-facing know-how keeps teams aligned and ensures every interaction feels personal, no matter the channel.

Across industries, the characteristics of tacit knowledge stay the same. It’s learned through practice, refined through collaboration, and strengthened through culture.

When you connect tacit and explicit knowledge, you build an organization that learns faster than it forgets.

The next step is to make that culture real.

You need to enable employees to share openly, reward their contributions, and weave continuous learning into how your business works every day.

Culture, incentives, and change management

Building systems for knowledge capture is the easy part. The hard part is building a culture that makes sharing a daily habit.

When people see that their insights matter and that sharing them helps everyone succeed, tacit knowledge starts to flow naturally.

These next four steps will help you turn that idea into action.

Step 1. Build a culture of sharing

Culture is not created through policies; it is built through small, consistent moments of openness. Sharing needs to feel natural, not forced.

Here’s where to start:

• Add a two-minute reflection to every project closeout. Ask, “What would we repeat, and what would we change?”
• Encourage employees to share one lesson and one watch-out in team chats or retrospectives.
• Rotate who speaks during wrap-ups so different perspectives surface.
• Use a light, repeatable format that captures the task, context, and outcome.
• Make these reflections part of existing rituals such as standups, sprint reviews, or monthly reports so they do not feel like extra work.

When sharing becomes routine, employees start connecting their day-to-day work to the bigger picture.

Tacit knowledge moves from conversations into documented learning without formal programs or bureaucracy.

Outcomes if you get this right

Teams adapt faster to change, reduce repeated mistakes, and help new employees ramp up quicker because practical lessons are already visible.

Tip

Start small and stay consistent. Add one reflection prompt to a recurring meeting and let it become part of your team’s rhythm.

Step 2. Recognize and reward contributors

People keep sharing when they see it leads to real recognition. Rewards do not always need to be financial; sometimes, visibility and appreciation are enough.

Here’s how to make that real:

• Include knowledge sharing as part of performance and promotion criteria.
• Recognize contributors publicly in meetings, dashboards, or newsletters.
• Track and celebrate reused insights, not just uploaded files.
• Invite contributors to share a five-minute story at team meetings.
• Create lightweight “sharing badges” for employees who make information visible or simplify complex processes.

When recognition becomes visible, knowledge sharing stops feeling like a side task and becomes part of what “doing a good job” means.

Shell applied this principle to its global programs by celebrating teams that reused insights to improve efficiency across sites.

Outcomes if you get this right

You will see higher engagement from team members, stronger collaboration across departments, and measurable improvements in productivity.

Tip

Do not wait until year-end reviews to celebrate contributions. Mention them in everyday check-ins so appreciation stays fresh.

Step 3. Coach managers to draw knowledge out

Managers are the bridge between expertise and documentation. They create the conditions where tacit knowledge is noticed, discussed, and shared.

Here’s how to empower them:

• Train managers to ask questions that reveal thought processes, such as “What made you notice that?” or “How did you decide on that next step?”
• Use open-ended prompts during reviews or retros to capture how intuition guided success.
• Pair experienced employees with new hires on live projects to transfer skills through practice.
• Encourage managers to record short debriefs capturing key decisions and lessons.
• Give leaders time and tools to make coaching and reflection part of regular routines, not afterthoughts.

This approach helps surface the subtle decision-making patterns that define how work really gets done.

Over time, it builds a stronger sense of psychological safety and the trust needed for people to share what they do not know as freely as what they do.

Outcomes if you get this right

Your teams become more confident in their problem-solving, more willing to speak up with new ideas, and more consistent in how they make decisions under pressure.

Tip

Model curiosity from the top. When leaders share their own lessons learned, especially mistakes, it sets the tone that reflection and openness are strengths.

Step 4. Keep the cycle alive

Tacit knowledge does not stay current on its own. Continuous learning requires a rhythm of renewal with small, frequent updates that keep shared experience fresh and useful.

Here’s how to sustain it:

• Add a quick “before action” huddle ahead of major launches or audits to gather risk signals.
• Host short knowledge-sharing sessions every month where teams exchange three quick wins or lessons.
• Bring in people from different departments to add new perspectives.
• Mark outdated materials for review and refresh them with examples that reflect current realities.
• Set quarterly check-ins to revisit what is being shared, how often, and how it is used.

Pernod Ricard applies this principle by encouraging teams in different regions to share what worked locally and why.

Those updates helped the business adapt promotions and campaigns to local markets faster, showing how relational tacit knowledge can drive results.

Outcomes if you get this right

You will reduce repeat errors, improve cross-border collaboration, and keep institutional knowledge alive even as people rotate roles.

Tip

Keep it light but regular. Ten small updates every month are more valuable than one big report at the end of the year.

When your culture, incentives, and leadership align, tacit knowledge becomes part of how your company thinks and works.

This turns sharing from a one-time task into a shared mindset that keeps your organization learning faster than it forgets.

Turn knowledge sharing into measurable business value

Once you’ve built a culture of sharing, the next challenge is proving its impact.

Measurement turns knowledge management from an abstract idea into a performance driver your leadership can support.

When you can show that capturing tacit knowledge improves speed, quality, and decision-making confidence, momentum follows naturally.

Track the signals that knowledge is working

Use a balance of leading and lagging indicators to show both behavioral change and business outcomes.

These metrics reveal where knowledge is being gained, reused, and refined. They will also indicate where knowledge gaps still exist.

Now you can make informed decisions on where to develop new expertise or invest in better processes.

Pair every number with a story

Numbers get attention. Stories create belief. When reporting results, add one short example that connects data to real-world impact:

• A factory team cut ramp-up time by 30% after documenting changeover practices.
• A marketing team reused past insights to shorten campaign planning cycles.
• A research team made faster, more confident decisions using shared playbooks.

Stories like these make your results tangible and keep leadership focused on the value of continued investment.

Keep leaders invested

Link every result to outcomes that matter: productivity, innovation speed, and risk reduction.

Build reporting into regular business reviews so progress stays visible. Then, this visibility can show you where to develop deeper expertise and strengthen your knowledge culture over time.

Bring it full circle

When measurement and storytelling work together, your organization can prove that knowledge sharing delivers real results. It keeps employees engaged, builds resilience, and drives continuous learning.

All that's left is for you and your teams to start using what you've learned today, and having the right partner can help you do that.

How Stravito can help turn knowledge sharing into measurable value

Once you have built a culture of sharing, the next challenge is keeping that knowledge findable, measurable, and actionable at scale. That is where Stravito helps.

Stravito gives global teams a single place to connect their tacit and explicit knowledge. It turns insights, context, and experience into something everyone can use.

With Stravito, you can:

• Centralize what people know. Bring research reports, best practices, and first-hand insights together in one hub so teams can learn from both documented and lived experience.
• Keep information flowing. Group insights into collections that reflect how your business operates, whether by process, region, or project.
• Use AI intelligently. Stravito’s AI Assistant summarizes interviews, identifies related themes, and links back to original sources so provenance stays clear.
• Measure engagement and reuse. Track which insights are being shared and how they influence decisions to prove the real impact of knowledge management.

When you combine a strong sharing culture with the right technology, your business can make knowledge work like a living system that develops expertise, closes knowledge gaps, and drives smarter decisions every day.

Your next step is to request a Stravito demo.

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