I hear a lot about tacit knowledge; knowledge which is difficult to transfer to another person by means of writing it down or verbalising it. It’s our knowledge which is rooted in personal experiences, hands-on practice, context, intuition, and insights.

How are you differentiating between that and cognitive bias?

• How are you avoiding confirmation bias and the tendency to search for, interpret, and remember information in a way that confirms your preconceptions?
• How are you avoiding relying on the first piece of information when you make decisions?
• How much of your knowledge is hindsight and seeing events as having been predictable?
• How much are you overestimating the availability of information and using that, rather than the more difficult and harder to find data?
• Most importantly, are you – or the people you work with – attributing positive events to your character, but attributing negative events to external factors?

If you’re supporting people in the workplace, tacit knowledge is a tough thing to capture. Making sure it’s valid, relevant and specific is even tougher.