Tacit knowledge digitization
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Tacit knowledge digitization converts expertise that lives in practice — judgment, feel, sequence, the tells experts respond to without naming — into structured digital form that others can use. The method matters: tacit knowledge surfaces in demonstration and narration, not in writing assignments.
DeemL is a know-how activation platform: it captures expert knowledge and activates it as guided, governed work.
What it is
Polanyi’s classic observation — we know more than we can tell — is an operational fact before it’s a philosophical one: the machinist who “just hears” the bad bearing cannot write that down, and asking them to is why documentation projects capture the 40% that was already explicit. Digitizing tacit knowledge means meeting it where it lives: capturing the expert doing and narrating the work, then structuring what was demonstrated — the steps, the decision points, the “here’s why” — into a form that transfers.
Why it matters for industrial knowledge work
The retirement cliff is a tacit-knowledge event. What leaves with a thirty-year expert is precisely the part that never made it into the SOP — and exit interviews, shadowing programs, and writing mandates all fail the same way: they ask tacit knowledge to become explicit by request. Capture-in-the-flow is the method that matches the material.
Where DeemL stands
Multimodal capture — voice at the machine, video of the work, narrated demonstration — structured automatically into draft guidance for the expert to review and approve. Minutes of narration instead of documentation projects; the judgment captured with the procedure, because it was captured from the practice.
FAQ
What’s the difference between tacit and explicit knowledge?
Explicit knowledge can be written and handed over; tacit knowledge shows up only in performance — judgment, timing, feel — and transfers through demonstration.
Can tacit knowledge really be digitized?
The performance of it can be captured and structured — steps, branch points, narrated reasoning. What’s digitized is a usable representation faithful enough to guide someone else, approved by the expert it came from.