Implicit vs. Explicit Knowledge

Jun 5, 2024

I was sitting in a professional learning and development meeting today about resilience and collaboration. He was quite the animated and engaging speaker, but as usual, most of everything he said was pretty basic and self-explanatory. I would argue that it was all common sense. I’ve felt this way about many of my classes before–mostly the non-STEM ones. In my communications class, of course, there’s verbal and nonverbal communication. In my systems class, of course, some systems are complex and some are simple. In my design class, of course, we should make mockups before actually building products. In many of these situations, I don’t think I ever left thinking I had learned anything new or revolutionary. I’ve walked out thinking a class was completely useless simply because I felt like the material was obvious. Over time, I began to realize that I may have been thinking of these things the wrong way–I’ve learned that verbalizing and conceptualizing a trivial concept changes the way we think about things.

I wanted to bring light to the difference between implicit and explicit knowledge1. Implicit knowledge is knowledge we consider to be common sense. It’s the assumptions that can be expressed without necessarily having to conceptualize something tangible. For example, when brainstorming new ideas for a project, you and your teammates might write quick ideas on sticky notes and put them on a board. After a quick brainstorming session, you group similar ideas and try to pick the ones worth keeping. This is a pretty natural process that a lot of people would also come up with. However, in the corporate world, there’s a defined and accepted term for this process: affinity mapping. Imagine your professor in your consulting class brought attention to this idea, telling your group that this is a good way to get a project going. This idea is so simple, straightforward, and obvious that you might not think much of it. But, explicitly conceptualizing this idea turns it into something tangible that you can refer to moving forward. Introducing the physical idea of affinity mapping is where the implicit knowledge becomes explicit knowledge–information that is documented, codified, and easily communicated with other people.

There are four insights. First, making ideas concrete and tangible in our minds allows us to exploit our knowledge to the fullest extent. People make frameworks of simple and obvious ideas for this reason. We most effectively use something when it is concrete. It’s hard to exploit ideas that kind of just float around in our heads, and they only become useful once they exist in an organized way. A pie chart is an obvious and easy way of showing percentages. It’s a simple idea, but without being taught about pie charts by your teachers, would you instinctively think to use one to represent percentage data?

Second, everything taught is explicit knowledge. Humans are literally made to think in organized ways. The whole reason you go to school is to learn things and information that is explicit and codified. We don’t learn things in a jumble. We organize learning into subjects and topics, grouping ideas that are similar and relevant to one another. Algebra doesn’t exist in nature. Humans did work on math, realized that there was some unifying backbone between certain ideas, and grouped it into one topic and called it “algebra.” All classes teach some things that are common sense. Some classes only teach things that are common sense. But, when you really think about it, they are codifying knowledge that you might have but do not explicitly organize in your head. When you approach problems in the future, these classes teach you what to think and how to think based on what worked in the past. It removes the guesswork and how much active thinking you have to do, letting you focus only on what is actually important2.

Third, human experience is implicit knowledge. When you’re sitting in the shower and have a realization, you’re converting your implicit knowledge into explicit knowledge. You turn things you have observed and were aware of into something with meaning. No one else has this knowledge because no one else is you. The act of thinking itself is simply a conversion of implicit knowledge to explicit knowledge. It’s funny that we have to think. When you are given a math problem, you already have all the information necessary to solve it (given that there is a solution). Instead, we have to figure out the intermediate steps to get to the answer rather than just having the answer on the spot. That’s because not everything is known at once. Things have to be figured out. Implicit knowledge has to become explicit.

Lastly, this discussion was pretty trivial. This whole piece might be so obvious that it didn’t even need to be written. It’s very possible I created a deep topic out of something shallow. It’s also possible that all of this is simply nonsense. Regardless, by writing this, I have converted some implicit knowledge into explicit knowledge.


  1. I assume there is some term for this phenomenon somewhere out there, but this is a concept I tried to think of myself. ↩︎

  2. This is a theoretical discussion. Some teachers suck. Some classes are actually useless. But, some supposedly useless classes may have been useful in ways you didn’t consider. ↩︎


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