Of Maps and Men
“The best-laid plans of mice and men/often go awry”
How do you go from sharing information to learning new knowledge? Experts describe two types of knowledge, explicit and tacit. Explicit knowledge is the type that organizations and people exchange by giving instruction and writing steps or details in how-to guides, policies and procedures, or instruction manuals. You can often exchange explicit knowledge regulalrly and it can be done for basic skills, like say maybe map reading. I suggest most good trainers can sit down with a complete novice and after a matter of hours have them reading a military map.
Tacit knowledge is the type of knowledge that comes from experience, intuition, and basically a gut feeling. Some of it can be expressed, but other types are difficult for a trainer to actually teach. Consider
explaining to someone how to glance at terrain features and then by using their own experience to be able to convert that 3D view to a spot on 2D map and quickly identify a location. That is probably harder to get across in a simple data exchange.
As I was preparing for what would have been my magnum opus blog entry this week, the firewall on the network provided by the local Directorate of Information Management (DOIM) stopped me dead in my tracks. I was seeking out that one golden nugget to really hammer the nail home on Knowledge Management, but sorry boss, no can do.