From The Economist:
LAST MONTH Odysseus became the first American spacecraft to land on the surface of the Moon in more than 50 years. The mission, a collaboration between NASA and a private firm called Intuitive Machines, can be counted a partial success: the craft did send back images even though its landing did not go to plan. Things might have gone better still if it had not been so long since NASA last visited the Moon. Experience usually makes things go more smoothly.
NASA does have an archive of materials from the Apollo missions. Sometimes, however, knowledge is lost for good. Gino Cattani of NYU Stern School of Business and his co-authors have looked at the violin-making family dynasties of Antonio Stradivari and others in Cremona, in Italy, in the 17th and 18th centuries. Modern players still laud the sound of the instruments made by these craftsmen. But there was a gap of about a century between the heyday of these dynasties and the rise of the public performances that showcased the instruments’ qualities. In that time the techniques of the Cremonese luthiers were lost.
Most organisations do not routinely blast into orbit or wait a century for customer feedback. But all organisations face the problem of storing and transferring knowledge so that newcomers know what’s what, lessons are learned from successes and failures, and wheels are not constantly being reinvented. An ageing workforce adds to the urgency of training inexperienced hires before the old hands leave the building.
Some knowledge is easier to codify than other. In the 1960s Corning, a glassmaker, had developed a particularly strong glass that was christened Chemcor. Plans to commercialise this material faltered—among other reasons, it turned out that this was not a great windscreen for motorists to hit at speed—and Chemcor was put on the shelf.
There it remained until 2005, when the firm started to wonder whether mobile phones might provide a use for Chemcor, which was renamed Gorilla Glass. In 2007 the boss of Corning took a call from Steve Jobs, who was hunting for the right kind of glass for a new smartphone. You presume that no one at Corning has since questioned the value of keeping good records.
The tougher task is capturing “tacit knowledge”. This is the know-how born of experience, which cannot easily be documented in the manuals and is not much thought about by those who have it.
Working alongside experienced colleagues is the best way to transfer tacit knowledge but it is not always possible. Sometimes you only want your very best people working on something, especially if the stakes are high. The most valuable employees are usually the ones with the least time to mentor others. When NASA was working on a Mars rover programme in the 2010s, it gave younger engineers a smaller, parallel project: to build a rover for use in educational programmes on Earth. It wasn’t the real thing, but it was a way to give them some hands-on experience. NASA also has an emeritus programme that gets retired veterans to mentor junior staff.
Technology is both an answer and a barrier to the transfer of tacit knowledge. It is easier than ever to record and disseminate the wisdom of older hands. Unfortunately, it is easier than ever to record and disseminate the wisdom of older hands: the podcast episodes proliferate, the hours of unwatched training videos pile up. Watching someone on a screen is often less stimulating than hearing from them face-to-face. A recent study by Niina Nurmi and Satu Pakarinen, two Finnish researchers, found that participants in virtual meetings feel drowsier than those meeting in person, which is saying something.
Christopher Myers of Johns Hopkins University is a fan of informal storytelling as a way of passing on tacit knowledge. He spent time with the crews on an air medical transport team in America, whose jobs include flying patients by helicopter from the scene of an emergency to a hospital. Crew members routinely shared stories—on shift changes, at mealtimes and at weekly meetings—in order to learn how to respond to unusual situations. (Top tip: in the event of a poisonous-snake bite, the local zoo is a good bet to get antivenom.)
Link to the rest at The Economist
PG was interested in the OP because serious authors have to either seek out or develop their own tacit knowledge about their business.
In traditional publishing circles, literary agents can be sources of tacit knowledge about traditional publishing for authors. Literary agents may have worked for one or more publishers in the past and have retained tacit knowledge from those experiences. New literary agents often learn from more experienced literary agents.
PG will share a bit of tacit knowledge he developed while helping authors with publishing contracts:
- A great many publishers of all sizes have poorly-drafted publishing contracts. Size is no guarantee of a quality publishing contract.
- Many literary agents value their contacts with publishers more highly than they regard a single author, even one with a respectable publishing record. These agents won’t risk getting on the bad side of an editor merely to help an author/client.
- An exception to the previous knowledge item may come into play if the author happens to be a one-of-a-kind celebrity of some sort. Taylor Swift is an example. Bill Gates is another. Whether such celebrity is much good at writing is of no concern to the agent.
- Publishers instinctively dislike lawyers who are representing authors. In fact, they would prefer to never have to think about or encounter a lawyer. Ever. Throughout all eternity. This attitude may explain why the staff lawyers working for publishers are not very good.
What the OP calls “tacit knowledge”, presumably to avoid using the ” c” word so despised in certain circles (though I wouldn’t discount ignorance), is properly termed Corporate Knowledge and it is managed through an entire, distinct branch of business management, recognized as such since the last century.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knowledge_management
In the STEM world, and engineering in particular, the primary means of retaining and managing corporate knowledge and mission critical skills are mentoring, documentation databases, inhouse training, and inhouse software development that encapsulates best practices develoed over the life of the corporation. Also, to a fairly large extent, inhouse promotion practices; people are generally happy to train new hires and successors when they are recognized and rewarded for it, often leading to promotion. Less so when they are being fired.
As recently seen, the exemplars of what happens when corporations fail at knowledge management is today’s BOEING who seem to have forgotten how to build quality aircraft, and Russia’s ROSCOSMOS who have forgotten how to build leak-proof space hardware. In both cases, lives are endangered through managerial incompetence.
Such concerns are less likely in corporate publishing and there really is little use for modern knowledge managemen tools in a business run on a 19th century business model of gut feelings, guesses, and nepotism/cronyism. They aren’t even particularly good at basics like inventory management despite their attachment to deadtree pulp products. Not much enduring knowledge to be managed in that business.
So “tacit knowledge”? Maybe they think it is something new.
Oh, I learned the term as “institutional knowledge.” At my old paper, I noticed we were yet in another round of buyouts. It was so bad that when one veteran columnist unexpectedly died a few reporters whispered, “how many jobs will be saved since they don’t have to pay his salary now?”
In that round of buyouts, we were suffering painful losses because unlike the previous rounds, the next group were more “indispensable” as it were. What about their institutional knowledge? I wasn’t the only one asking this. When news of a particular story broke, there was the one white-haired reporter on the shift that morning who knew exactly who and where to call to get vital info ASAP. The younger reporters didn’t have a clue.
I immediately started investigating wiki software to capture important data, with an eye to making sure the wiki was user friendly. I was always writing up tutorials and training people anyway, but my goal with the wiki was that any of the editors and reporters could contribute to it. The whole reason I wrote tutorials was to overcome their lack of tech skills, so I wanted to make sure the wiki was accessible and easy for them. But alas, I didn’t get far into this project before the bell tolled again…
I’m big on archiving, backing up, and documenting processes and techniques. It was a happy day when I discovered the practice of “commenting” lines of code. But mentoring is better still. We had apprentice high school students at my paper, but I would like the practice of apprenticeships to come back into vogue on a wider scale. I didn’t know the methods of Stradivarius had been lost. That sounds like a criminal shame.
As for Boeing, I’ve now adapted the mantra: “If it’s Boeing, I’m not going.”
Allegedly, the marketing & money men are in charge at Boeing, and not the engineers anymore. Which seems a remarkably stupid turn of events; hopefully someone executes a coup or a takeover or whatever before entire planes start falling out of the sky. When I was a child Northwest Airlines Flight 255 crashed not far from where I grew up. I drive down that highway every so often, so this is not an abstract concern …
Your Wiki project was a great idea. And a not uncommon one at the time; the web was *created* for that kind of effort. You may or not have been aware but you were following in the footsteps of Vannevar Bush, who envisioned such a system way back in 1945. He called it MEMEX. During the early days of the public internet a lot of companies used APACHE web servers as internal document repositories. Microsoft, being Microsoft (all about tools and platforms) took the idea and ran with it, taking it one step beyond and adding real time collaboration capabilities (something they’d been working on since the 90’s as part of Enterprise OFFICE–we used it for a while which is why I know of it) and the result became SHAREPOINT. It is pretty much a secret at the consumer level but SHAREPOINT is massive:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/SharePoint#:~:text=SharePoint%20is%20a%20web-based%20collaborative%20platform%20that%20integrates,implementing%20internal%20applications%2C%20and%20for%20implementing%20business%20processes.
“SharePoint is a web-based collaborative platform that integrates natively with Microsoft 365. Launched in 2001,[6] SharePoint is primarily sold as a document management and storage system, although it is also used for sharing information through an intranet, implementing internal applications, and for implementing business processes.
“According to Microsoft, as of December 2020 SharePoint had over 200 million users.”
“SharePoint allows for storage, retrieval, searching, archiving, tracking, management, and reporting on electronic documents and records. Many of the functions in this product are designed around various legal, information management, and process requirements in organizations. SharePoint also provides search and ‘graph’ functionality.[19][20] SharePoint’s integration with Microsoft Windows and Microsoft 365 (previously known as Office) allows for collaborative real-time editing, and encrypted/information rights managed synchronization.
This capability is often used to replace an existing corporate file server, and is typically coupled with an enterprise content management policy.”
—
As the Wikipedia link says, companies use SHAREPOINT in a lot of different ways but at heart it is Bush’s MEMEX in digital form. In its most basic form it is “just” an off the shelf document management system a company can buy and install to handle their institutional knowledge. Over the last 20 years it has evolved more and more realtime interactivity to the point some company use it as their core day to day platform, linking to (naturally) other MS products like OFFICE, SERVER, TEAMS (video conferencing), etc. The thing is an octopus. And now that MS is adding LLM models to everything it is only a matterbof time before SHAREPOINT gains sentience. 😉
Too bad it wasn’t around when your paper needed it. 🙂
SHAREPOINT isn’t the only such product–companies learned the productivity value of institutional knowledge management decades ago–which is why the OP acting like its so “cutting edge” is amusing. By now it just another software package comanies buy and pay con$sultant$ to install and configure, just like accounting or HR software. An essential capability to run a modern institution. (Non profits use it too.)
21st century.
FWIW, the MEMEX:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memex
“Memex is a hypothetical electromechanical device for interacting with microform documents and described in Vannevar Bush’s 1945 article “As We May Think”. Bush envisioned the memex as a device in which individuals would compress and store all of their books, records, and communications, “mechanized so that it may be consulted with exceeding speed and flexibility”. The individual was supposed to use the memex as an automatic personal filing system, making the memex “an enlarged intimate supplement to his memory”.[1] The name memex is a portmanteau of memory and expansion.”
Companies have these capabilities today, for a price.
By next year, the core capability of quickly searching the *contents* of one’s own accumulated digital documents is coming to WINDOWS via its COPILOT LLM tool.
MEMEX for the rest of us.
To expand a little bit on point 4:
It’s not just that the lawyers who work for publishers “aren’t very good” (in this shark’s opinion, that’s rather generous). It’s that they are oblivious to the present and living in the past — relying exclusively upon the “tacit knowledge of the firm” extolled by the OP. For example, in the late 1990s this shark had an… opportunity… to deal with the paragons of the profession who were general counsel, associate general counsel, and chief of contracts for [name of then-Big-Six publisher redacted]. All three had been practicing for well over two decades, and were thoroughly familiar with and attempted to browbeat me with esoteric details from a five-decades-old appellate opinion on works made for hire from the Second Circuit. They each expressed unfamiliarity with a less-than-a-decade-old Supreme Court opinion on the subject that overruled the critical portion of that Second Circuit opinion by effect… and with the text of the 1976 Copyright Act.
Needless to say, things haven’t gotten discernably better since. Pointing out to another big NYC publisher that prohibiting an author from publishing under her own name without the publisher’s prior written permission violated decade-old New York law regarding unfair restrictions on competition got a “Nonsense, that can’t possibly apply, you said it’s in the Labor Law and the author isn’t our employee” instead of a “Let me check that statute and get back to you” (hint: It’s classified in the Labor Law but by its own terms applies to independent contractors). And the less said about facial violations of the Bankruptcy Code embedded in even last week’s publishing contracts, and “ownership of plates,” the better; frankly, I’d expect better from ChatGPT.
The tacit knowledge of the firm needs to be a foundation, not the entire structure.