Tacit Knowledge Codification With ChatGPT

About this course

“This course contains the use of artificial intelligence.”Let’s start with a story.A veteran nurse walks into a patient’s room. The monitors look normal. The patient’s chart shows no red flags. But the nurse pauses and says, “Something isn’t right.” Moments later, the patient crashes — and thanks to that instinct, the team is ready and saves a life.How did she know? Not from a checklist, not from a manual. It was years of experience — subtle patterns she couldn’t easily explain.That is tacit knowledge in action.What is Tacit Knowledge?Tacit knowledge is the know-how that lives in people’s heads and bodies. It’s intuitive, hard to formalize, but incredibly powerful.Philosopher Michael Polanyi put it perfectly: “We know more than we can tell.”Compare it to explicit knowledge, which is easy to write down and share:Explicit = your company’s policy manual.Tacit = how your top salesperson knows when to stop talking and let silence close the deal.Explicit knowledge is like the recipe. Tacit knowledge is like the chef’s touch.Why Businesses Struggle With ItNow, why does this matter for business? Because tacit knowledge is often the real competitive edge — but it’s also the easiest to lose.When an experienced project manager retires, decades of judgment walk out the door.When startups grow fast, processes evolve informally. Without codification, the “real way things get done” stays locked in a few people’s heads.The result? Bottlenecks, slow onboarding, and repeated mistakes.Think of it this way: losing tacit knowledge is like letting your company’s secret sauce evaporate.The SECI Model (Simplified)Researchers Nonaka and Takeuchi described how knowledge move