“This course contains the use of artificial intelligence.”

Let’s start with a story.

A veteran nurse walks into a patient’s room. The monitors look normal. The patient’s chart shows no red flags. But the nurse pauses and says, “Something isn’t right.” Moments later, the patient crashes — and thanks to that instinct, the team is ready and saves a life.

How did she know? Not from a checklist, not from a manual. It was years of experience — subtle patterns she couldn’t easily explain.

That is tacit knowledge in action.

What is Tacit Knowledge?

Tacit knowledge is the know-how that lives in people’s heads and bodies. It’s intuitive, hard to formalize, but incredibly powerful.

Philosopher Michael Polanyi put it perfectly: “We know more than we can tell.”

Compare it to explicit knowledge, which is easy to write down and share:

• Explicit = your company’s policy manual.

• Tacit = how your top salesperson knows when to stop talking and let silence close the deal.

Explicit = your company’s policy manual.

Tacit = how your top salesperson knows when to stop talking and let silence close the deal.

Explicit knowledge is like the recipe. Tacit knowledge is like the chef’s touch.

Why Businesses Struggle With It

Now, why does this matter for business? Because tacit knowledge is often the real competitive edge — but it’s also the easiest to lose.

• When an experienced project manager retires, decades of judgment walk out the door.

• When startups grow fast, processes evolve informally. Without codification, the “real way things get done” stays locked in a few people’s heads.

When an experienced project manager retires, decades of judgment walk out the door.

When startups grow fast, processes evolve informally. Without codification, the “real way things get done” stays locked in a few people’s heads.

The result? Bottlenecks, slow onboarding, and repeated mistakes.

Think of it this way: losing tacit knowledge is like letting your company’s secret sauce evaporate.

The SECI Model (Simplified)

Researchers Nonaka and Takeuchi described how knowledge moves in organizations using the SECI spiral:

Socialization – Tacit shared tacitly (apprenticeship, shadowing).

Externalization – Tacit becomes explicit (telling stories, drawing diagrams).

Combination – Explicit knowledge combines into manuals, systems, processes.

Internalization – People practice and absorb, turning explicit back into tacit.

For us, the critical stage is Externalization — making the invisible visible. That’s the focus of this course: capturing tacit know-how and codifying it into repeatable katas.

Who This Course is For

This course is designed for subject matter experts, trainers, leaders, and consultants who need to preserve critical know-how, accelerate skill transfer, and leverage AI to scale expertise across teams.

What You Will Learn

By the end of this course, you will be able to:

• Identify tacit knowledge patterns within expert performance using structured elicitation techniques.

• Codify hidden expertise into explicit, repeatable katas for training and coaching.

• Apply 24-hour transfer methods to validate knowledge retention and accelerate skill adoption.

• Develop an AI-powered mini-tutor (Codifier GPT) to scale personalized coaching.

• Evaluate & Iterate your codified routines through continuous assessment and learner feedback.

Identify tacit knowledge patterns within expert performance using structured elicitation techniques.

Codify hidden expertise into explicit, repeatable katas for training and coaching.

Apply 24-hour transfer methods to validate knowledge retention and accelerate skill adoption.

Develop an AI-powered mini-tutor (Codifier GPT) to scale personalized coaching.

Evaluate & Iterate your codified routines through continuous assessment and learner feedback.

Why This Matters for Business

Organizations risk losing their most valuable expertise when it remains trapped in tacit form. Codification ensures continuity, faster onboarding, and scalable excellence. By embedding AI into the process, you can accelerate training, reduce knowledge loss, and create sustainable systems of expertise that drive long-term business performance.