Tacit knowledge

Tacit knowledge is the understanding built by doing the work beside someone who already knows how. It is not the procedure in the manual; it is the reason the experienced person knows the procedure will fail on this particular Tuesday. You learn it in the gap between the written rule and the live situation: what a client’s silence means, when a spreadsheet that balances still smells wrong, which problem needs escalating before the dashboard turns red. This is why the disappearance of junior work is a bigger problem than fewer entry-level jobs. The repetitive task was also the room where judgement travelled from one generation to the next, and tacit knowledge does not transfer neatly in a document. It passes through shared work.