Tacit Knowledge
Working knowledge that lives in a person's head through daily experience and has never been captured in a system, document, or catalog. Distinct from recorded metadata, which is knowledge a system or document already states. An estate survey needs both; tacit knowledge is usually the harder of the two to find and the more likely to reveal a real problem.
Defined in 3 GAGE programs, which carry 5 distinct definitions of it. The wording above is taught in AI Data Governance: The Data Chair.
How each discipline defines it
The same term does different work depending on who is using it. These are the definitions as each program teaches them, unedited.
Working knowledge that lives in a person's head through daily experience and has never been captured in a system, document, or catalog. Distinct from recorded metadata, which is knowledge a system or document already states. An estate survey needs both; tacit knowledge is usually the harder of the two to find and the more likely to reveal a real problem.
Knowledge that is difficult to articulate and often unavailable to conscious awareness, built through implicit learning from repeated real exposure; the substance of expert judgment (Patterson, Pierce, Bell and Klein, 2010).
Expertise that has become invisible to the expert who holds it, so it is never written down; the fluency about an estate that does not transfer on its own and must be deliberately extracted before a governor leaves.
Information existing only in people's minds (pricing rules, customer preferences, operational shortcuts) that has not been documented or digitized.
understanding an individual holds through experience but has not necessarily articulated in writing, such as knowing which specific undocumented workaround a legacy pipeline needs without being able to immediately explain why.
Where it is taught
The exact lessons this term appears in. The first 7 topics of every program are free with a free account.
- Data Readiness for Small Operations · Digital Foundations, AI Literacy & Professional Conduct
- The Experience Gap Solution: Guided Practice for Professional Judgment · AI in the Workplace and Team Leadership, AI Literacy & Professional Conduct
- The interview sweep: what the humans know about the data that the systems do not · The Estate Survey, AI Data Governance: The Data Chair
- The handover: what you now know that no certification could have taught you · The Estate Audit, AI Data Governance: The Data Chair
- Your successor's briefing: documenting your organization's AI estate so command can transfer · Staying Current: The Frontier Discipline, AI Governance: Applied Mastery
Terms it appears with
Not an alphabetical neighbourhood: these are the terms taught in the same lessons, ranked by how often they appear together.