Study Knowledge Below the Surface
Participant observation and access data can work together to show how explicit material becomes practical judgment without treating tacit and explicit knowledge as separate worlds.
Knowledge does not divide cleanly into what people can write down and what they cannot. A document can be explicit, available, and well indexed, yet still require experience before someone knows when and how to use it. A practitioner’s judgment can appear tacit, yet still depend on records, language, tools, and repeated encounters with documented material.
An iceberg analogy can describe this relation. Visible explicit knowledge rests on a larger foundation of tacit knowledge that gives it meaning and context. The analogy is useful if it does not become a claim that the visible and hidden portions are separate categories. Knowledge appears in blends, and effective transfer has to address both dimensions together.
That makes the investigation problem more interesting: how can a knowledge manager study what people do with explicit material without mistaking access for understanding, or treating every piece of unrecorded judgment as a dark and mysterious substance by default?
The distant view has value
For the distant view, imagine a knowledge manager as an ecologist with a drone. From above, the observer can study contours, collect data, and see patterns that are difficult to perceive while participating in the work. Search patterns, content engagement, and access records can show which explicit materials people find, revisit, ignore, or use in sequence.
This approach is easier and safer than deep participation. It can cover more territory. It can reveal broad patterns without requiring the observer to enter every local setting. It also has a limit: everything appears through a lens. The data can show that someone accessed a document. It cannot, by itself, establish what the person understood, applied, disputed, or carried into a later decision.
The drone view becomes most useful when its findings lead to a more grounded question. Why did this group repeatedly return to a resource, why did another group never find it, and what happened between access and application? The data gives us a route into the inquiry; it does not get to land the drone and announce the final answer.
The close view sees the conversion
For the close view, imagine a diver with freedom of movement and interpretation that the drone cannot provide. Participant observation allows a knowledge manager to see the work surrounding a search, a conversation, a document, or a practical decision. The observer can notice which parts of a record people treat as decisive, where they supply missing context from experience, and how a familiar method changes in use.
The diver cannot stay down forever. Close observation is time-consuming, partial, and shaped by the observer’s own position. It may capture a rich local account while missing a pattern that appears only across many users or projects. The limit is not a reason to abandon the work. It is a reason not to make the close view carry the entire system.
Build a hybrid investigation
Combine diving and drone observation. Participant observation and technological data collection complement each other. The hybrid approach gives a knowledge manager a better view of how explicit knowledge becomes tacit as people internalize and apply what they learn.
The phrase “becomes tacit” should remain careful. It does not mean a document disappears into a person. It means that repeated use can become practical judgment: a worker recognizes a condition, recalls a relevant record, adapts a method, and acts without needing to reconstruct the whole source every time.
A hybrid investigation follows that movement without pretending to measure it perfectly. Access data can show the path toward a resource. Observation can show how people interpret and use it. Interviews or reflective notes can help participants describe what the record gave them and what experience supplied beyond it.
The resulting account will still have limits, and I prefer those visible limits to a clean division between surface data and hidden expertise. Knowledge management becomes more credible when it studies the relation among the material people can find, the practical judgment they develop, and the conditions through which one becomes usable in the presence of the other. Dive where the access pattern raises a real question, then come back up with the context still attached.
