Two top management academics on the importance of tacit knowledge to organisational learning

The social technologies provide the best possible of opportunities for constant, rapid organisational learning we have yet seen. A company that isn’t getting busy on how to use them in learning as fast as its environment is changing, if not actually itself setting the pace of that change, might be looking at a short, disrupted future.

The two following excerpts from leading management academics support the need for organisations to get busy on creating the circumstances under which fast learning and breakthrough thinking can be fostered by exploiting a company’s reserves of tacit knowledge.

Although these pieces are both only a little over 10 years old, neither writer foresaw the potential of the social technologies to accelerate so dramatically the speed at which such work could, or needed to be, undertaken between individuals making up even highly geographically distributed workplaces.


Ronald Mascitelli, 2000

Tacit knowledge lies below the surface of conscious thought and is accumulated through a lifetime of experience, experimentation, perception, and learning by doing.

Managers who can tap into this vast pool of creative energy can elevate the innovative capabilities of their teams well beyond the incremental and mundane.

The ultimate goal is to establish a generative atmosphere for breakthrough innovation, in which divergent thinking, improvisation, and artistic creativity merge with the practical demands of the product development process.

Far less is known about the process of breakthrough product innovation, in which connections are made between technologies and markets that cannot be traced to a seamless lineage of existing knowledge.

In a sense, breakthrough innovations have "missing links" in their evolution; a sudden non sequitur that brings together disparate technologies and unanticipated needs.

Evidently, there is some capacity within highly innovative minds that enables the bridging of intellectual chasms and the merging of seemingly unrelated pools of knowledge.

These leaps of creativity are perhaps the least understood aspect of product innovation, yet they provide the greatest potential for sustainable competitive advantage.

Innovations that are unique, original, and unexpected are far more valuable from a competitive standpoint than innovations that are predictable, incremental, or mundane

The ability to create new and valuable breakthroughs offers firms an unambiguous competitive advantage.

Although such original thinking may manifest itself in a variety of ways, its source is always the same: the creative power of the human mind.

Evidently, it is not the quantity of intelligence, but rather the type of intelligence, that determines a propensity for breakthrough innovation.

From experience: Harnessing tacit knowledge to achieve breakthrough innovation, Journal of Innovation Management, 2000


Chris Argyris, 1999

Learning is defined as occurring under two conditions. First, learning occurs when an organization achieves what it intended; that is, there is a match between its design for action and the actuality or outcome. Second, learning occurs when a mismatch between intentions and outcomes is identified and it is corrected; that is, a mismatch is turned into a match.

Organizations do not perform the actions that produce the learning. It is individuals acting as agents of organizations who produce the behavior that leads to learning. Organizations can create conditions that may significantly influence what individuals frame as the problem, design as a solution, and produce as action to solve a problem.

On Organizational Learning, Wiley-Blackwell, 1999