Expert Knowledge Retention- Turning Tacit Knowledge into an Organizational Asset
- Zvia Hen
- 11 hours ago
- 5 min read
Expert knowledge retention is the process of preserving not only what experts know, but also how they analyze problems, make decisions, and apply experience. By capturing tacit knowledge alongside explicit knowledge, organizations can reduce knowledge loss, accelerate successor development, strengthen business continuity, and build lasting organizational capabilities.
One of the most intriguing challenges in the field of knowledge management is the attempt to document not only the professional and technical knowledge of employees and experts but also how they think. This challenge is especially pronounced when dealing with employees who have exceptional abilities in problem-solving, identifying opportunities, or creating innovative solutions.
To examine whether these capabilities can be documented, one must first understand what expertise is. Expertise is commonly defined as the ability to apply professional knowledge and work processes – grounded in ongoing learning and experience – and to offer sound and valuable solutions to challenging situations within a specific context. For example, an engineer who can propose diverse technological solutions that have never been tried before, an information security expert who identifies a threat scenario others have overlooked, or an experienced manager who finds a way to bridge units with conflicting interests. In these cases, the value relies not only on the professional knowledge itself but also on the ability to apply it at the right time and place, in a tailored manner, with the right stakeholders.
Many knowledge retention processes seek to expose the "behind the scenes" of experts’ professional thinking. Alongside the documentation of work processes, documents, procedures, methodologies, and decisions (explicit knowledge), companies and organizations try to understand how experts think, how they analyze problems, what questions they ask, how they identify important information, and what leads them to choose a particular course of action (tacit knowledge). The aspiration is clear: if we understand an expert’s thought processes, we can transfer that capability to others, reduce dependency on a single individual, or prevent the loss of knowledge when they leave.
However, a fundamental limitation emerges here. While it is relatively easy to document explicit technical knowledge, it is far more complex to document tacit knowledge – knowledge that the employee themselves may struggle to articulate, and which may therefore appear from the outside as "natural talent," "intuition," or "creativity," when in fact it represents professional depth accumulated over years or through specific projects under unique circumstances.
It can be said that a significant portion of an employee’s expertise is based on accumulated experience, professional intuition, pattern recognition, sensitivity to contexts and circumstances, and the ability to notice details that others tend to overlook. This knowledge develops over years of learning and professional experience. At times, even the employee themselves finds it difficult to precisely reconstruct and explain how they gain a particular insight or what led them to a specific decision.
The Purpose of Expert Knowledge Retention
The importance of an expert’s tacit knowledge has led many organizations to aspire to "clone expertise" through knowledge retention processes. It is important to understand that two employees with the same training may offer different solutions while facing the same problem. And even if we could document the way of thinking that led them to a particular solution, that is no guarantee that another person would produce the same result. For example, in one of the recently conducted knowledge-retention projects, an employee remarked, "There are good soccer players, but not all of them can be Messi."
And perhaps that is for the best. From a knowledge retention standpoint, the goal should not be documentation for the sake of "cloning" a particular employee’s expertise, but rather to understand and analyze thought processes and decision-making.
The purpose of preserving an expert’s tacit knowledge is to ensure professional and functional continuity, to turn knowledge into an organizational asset, to advance successors, and to significantly shorten their learning curve toward expertise.
What Is Preserved in the Knowledge Retention Process
Rather than attempting to create "copies" of experts, it is more appropriate to expose the key and complex projects in which they were involved, and through them to reveal that employee’s ways of observing, the questions that guided them, the assumptions they examined, and their approach to complex challenges and decision-making processes.
In knowledge retention processes, it is advisable to combine the documentation of explicitly defined knowledge – the "What" – what the expert knows and what needs to be done – with the "How": how to approach a problem and how is the best way to get things done. This combination may provide other employees with new perspectives and tools for developing their own expertise.
Therefore, the central question is not whether expertise can be preserved, but rather what exactly is sought to be preserved. If the goal is to replicate an expert’s thinking, the effort is likely to fail. If the goal is to shorten successors’ learning paths, allow them to learn from the expert’s ways of thinking, expose them to their professional reasoning, and expand their cognitive toolkit, then such documentation is of great value.
How Can We Access an Expert’s Tacit Knowledge?
There are several effective methods for uncovering an expert’s tacit knowledge and core behavioral patterns, for example:
Repeatedly asking "Why" – Why did you choose this approach? Why didn’t you act differently? What made you identify this as a problem?
This method "forces" the expert to anchor their actions in the foundational assumptions and professional beliefs they operate by, but are not necessarily aware of.
Helping refine articulation – When an expert explains a behavioral pattern vaguely, for example, "I feel this is right," one can help them articulate it explicitly. An alternative phrasing can be suggested, asking: “Is that what you meant? Refining the articulation may sharpen or reveal the expert’s behavioral pattern.
Discussing professional perceptions – Conversations with the expert about "How do you see the field?" and "What do you think is the right approach to a particular issue?" – these perceptions, built over years, are what guide their actions in practice. When made explicit, it becomes possible to examine how they manifest in the expert’s daily decision-making and ways of operating.
Documenting a clear process leading to a solution – In cases where the expert struggles to describe how they arrived at an idea, they are guided step by step through conversation, for example: "What did you know at the start?" "What did you rule out?" "What captured your attention?" "What led you to the solution?"
Retroactively describing the process may reveal the "mental roadmap" the expert operates by.
Building a mini-repository of typical cases – Collecting and documenting recurring situations the expert has dealt with – for example: edge cases, simple cases, especially complex cases – and creating a "case library" from which one can learn how the expert approaches different types of challenges. Such a repository is not a substitute for experience, but it significantly shortens the learning curve.
Learning about alternative courses of action – Asking the expert, "What else could you have done in this situation?" "Why did you reject the other approach?" "When would the alternative approach be preferable?"
The alternative that the experts rejected may reveal more about their considerations than the solution they chose.
Summary
Knowledge retention processes can and should include the systematic documentation of tacit knowledge and professional thought processes, with a sober understanding of its limitations. The value lies in creating conditions to transform tacit knowledge into an organizational asset, thereby maintaining functional continuity. Preserving expert knowledge will not necessarily produce new experts. Still, it may spark curiosity, broaden horizons, shorten the learning curve, and help employees who are interested in doing so find their own unique way to address the challenges of their role and become experts themselves.
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