“We know more than we can tell.”  With those seven words, Michael Polanyi (1966) captured the problem of tacit knowledge.  For if we cannot explain our knowledge, it cannot be used by others.

    Unfortunately, much of the knowledge about management—including performance management—cannot be easily “told.”  It exists, of course.  Some public managers are clearly more effective than others at improving performance.  We can label as lucky any manager who produces a single success.  Yet one who produces a series of multi-year performance improvements in a single organization or such improvements in multiple organizations cannot be so easily dismissed.

    These managers must know something.  But what?  What exactly is the nature of their knowledge?  And how can others learn and benefit from it?

    Books (Management Lessons from the Dog Park) and the Web (“5 Small Business Managements Lessons from Casablanca”) offer “management lessons.”  Unfortunately, such lessons are vague (but unobjectionable) aphorisms offering no situational guidance suggesting when they might (or might not be relevant).  Indeed, observed Herbert Simon (1946), such aphorisms often come in contradictory pairs.

    Tacit knowledge creates (at least) three problems. (1) The identification problem: What exactly is the nature of this knowledge?  (2) The transfer and learning problem: How can one human learn another’s tacit knowledge?  (3) The adaptation problem: How can a public manager adapt the tacit knowledge that proved effective in other circumstances to improve performance in a different organization?

    Identification is best done through cause-and-effect principles (explaining “how” a leadership activity affects the behavior of others) and illustrated through a variety of examples.  The principle itself is inadequate, for it is also little more than a vague aphorism.  And the examples themselves are inadequate, for each one is subject to multiple interpretations.  Only when the cause-and-effect workings of a leadership principle can be illustrated through multiple and different examples, can it be clearly understood.

    Transfer and learning are best accomplished person to person.  O’Dell and Grayson (1998) emphasize: “Tacit knowledge is best shared through people; explicit knowledge can be shared through machines.  Or, the more tacit the knowledge, the less high-tech the solution.”  Those who wish to learn the cause-and-effect principles that others employ benefit both from formal explanations and direct observation and contact.  Those who seek to convey their tacit principles to others do it best through an on-going mentoring relationship.

    Adaptation requires even more work and subtlety.  For even if there exist cause-and-effect management principles that explain how a particular strategy proved effective in different circumstances, and even if others have somehow learned these principles, to employ them to produce a different kind of result, another manager has to figure out how to adapt them—modifying the specifics of the examples to mesh with the manager’s unique purposes and circumstances.

    The task of measuring performance illustrates the challenge.  For although the techniques of performance measurement can be explained explicitly, the judgments about what to measure and how to use the measures depend significantly on the managers tacit knowledge.