Teaching Teamwork = Tacit Knowledge

Collective improvisation is most satisfying.

Thomas P Seager, PhD
Age of Awareness
Published in
3 min readAug 23, 2018

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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 it was their job. And they’re right, because nobody in such an organization knows anybody well enough to be able to assign jobs. These organizations are incapable for working in teams.

The next level up is where the team members have practiced well enough to understand their roles and responsibilities. At this level, they are able to coordinate their activities to accomplish tasks without duplicating effort, or working at cross-purposes.

At a level higher up, the team members understand the intent of the instructions. They do not need specific and explicit, or step-by-step instructions, because they all have an understanding of the values, culture, and vision of the organization. They have the capacity for collective judgment, and they are capable of making modifications to the instructions to fulfill the intent. (Most university classrooms do not teach this level of teamwork, and it is one of the chief complaints among employers of…

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