> "I know how to make this decision — I just cannot explain to anyone else how I am making it." ^pain A personal articulation pain. The worker has accumulated judgement, instincts, and pattern recognition through experience — and cannot externalise them when a colleague or successor asks. The pain becomes felt when the worker needs to delegate, mentor, or hand over a domain they have been working in for years; before that moment, the tacit knowledge sits invisibly inside their effectiveness and feels like nothing in particular. ## Discovery questions - "When you have to teach a colleague how you make a particular kind of decision, how does that conversation usually go?" - "Have you ever caught yourself saying 'just trust me on this' to someone who needed a real explanation?" - "What's something you do well that you'd struggle to write a useful guide for?" ^discovery-questions ## Examples - Nonaka and Takeuchi's SECI model case study of product development at Honda: expert engineers converted tacit know-how into explicit concepts only through intensive dialogue.[^1] - KM study of aircraft maintenance technicians: they struggled to document diagnostic intuition, requiring observation-based elicitation methods.[^2] - Cognitive task-analysis work at NASA: critical decision method and structured interviews to extract tacit knowledge from mission controllers whose expertise is hard to verbalise.[^3] [^1]: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/13662719500000015 [^2]: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S000368700000056X [^3]: https://ntrs.nasa.gov/citations/20030061013