What is Explicit Knowledge?
You built your business on a specific set of insights and skills. In the beginning, that information lived entirely in your head. You knew how to handle the difficult client, you knew the workaround for the software bug, and you knew exactly how to pitch your vision to investors. But as you add team members, you likely feel a creeping anxiety. You realize that if you are not in the room, things might not happen the way they should. You might feel the exhaustion of repeating the same instructions for the tenth time this month.
This is the struggle of knowledge transfer. It is the friction point between a founder-led operation and a scalable organization. To solve this, we have to look at the concept of Explicit Knowledge. It sounds academic, but it is actually the mechanism that allows you to take a vacation without checking your email every hour. It is the difference between a business that relies on a genius and a business that relies on a system.
Defining Explicit Knowledge in Your Business
Explicit Knowledge is information that can be readily articulated, codified, accessed, and verbalized. It is the knowledge that has been pulled out of a human brain and placed into a format that others can consume independently. If you can write it down, record it in a video, or put it into a database, it is explicit.
In a practical business context, this usually looks like:
- Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) and training manuals
- Employee handbooks and policy documents
- Customer Relationship Management (CRM) data entries
- Financial reports and market research white papers
- Instructional videos or recorded meeting transcripts
The defining characteristic here is transferability. Explicit Knowledge does not require the original author to be present for the consumer to learn it. It is objective and logical. However, we have to ask ourselves a difficult question. Can everything be made explicit? Is there a limit to what we can document, and does attempting to document everything actually slow us down?
Explicit Knowledge vs. Tacit Knowledge
Here is how to distinguish between the two:
- Explicit Knowledge is the “what” and the “how-to” that is rule-based. It is a recipe card listing ingredients and steps.
- Tacit Knowledge is the “know-how” and the “wisdom” gained through experience. It is the chef knowing exactly when the sauce is the right consistency by how it feels against the spoon.
We often see businesses struggle when they mistake one for the other. You can create an Explicit Knowledge document for how to log a support ticket. You cannot easily create a document that teaches someone how to de-escalate an angry client using empathy and tone. That requires coaching. As a manager, your challenge is identifying which parts of your business operation can be turned into data and which parts remain an art form.
The Role of Explicit Knowledge in Scaling
When you are in growth mode, the reliance on tribal knowledge becomes a liability. If only one person knows how to run payroll and they get sick, the business is vulnerable. Prioritizing Explicit Knowledge is essentially an insurance policy for your operations. It democratizes access to information so that your team is empowered to make decisions without waiting for your approval.
Consider these scenarios where this conversion is critical:
- Onboarding: New hires can absorb the company history, tools, and basic protocols through documentation, freeing up mentorship time for high-value cultural integration.
- Compliance: In regulated industries, if it is not written down, it did not happen. Explicit records are the only defense during audits.
- Consistency: If you want the customer experience to be uniform regardless of which employee is working, the process must be codified.
The Challenges of Articulating Knowledge
While the benefits are clear, the execution is painful. Creating Explicit Knowledge takes time. It forces you to slow down and analyze your own actions. It requires you to be a technical writer and a teacher simultaneously. Many business owners avoid this because they feel they are too busy doing the work to write about the work.
Furthermore, there is the risk of stagnation. Once knowledge is written down, it becomes static. If your market changes or your tools update, that document becomes a relic that can misguide your team. How do we build systems that remain living and breathing rather than bureaucratic and dusty? This is the ongoing tension of management. We must create structure to relieve stress, but we must ensure that structure does not become a cage that prevents agility.
