Teaching Teamwork = Tacit Knowledge

Collective improvisation is most satisfying.

In Erden and Nonaka’s paper “Quality of Group Tacit Knowledge” they introduce the idea that business value derives from tacit knowledge — that is, the knowledge that can only be gained through experience. Tacit knowledge cannot be codified, explicated, or completely documented. It is expensive to create and difficult to share. Therefore, a firm that has a high quality of shared tacit knowledge will be able to stay ahead of competitors that cannot acquire that knowledge.

As teams develop higher levels of group tacit knowledge, they are able to work in more creative, innovative, and adaptive ways.

At the lowest level (Fig. 1, left) teams have such a low level of communication, self-awareness, and collective knowledge that they can’t even follow instructions. We probably all have examples in our own experience in which the instructions were clear, and the people were motivated, but nobody knew who was supposed to do what… so nothing got done. The old excuse in such situations is that they didn’t know…