Elicit your own tacit knowledge by working through cases

Use concrete case analysis to surface the implicit rules you already follow but cannot state.

Why it works

Tacit knowledge is accessible through action and judgment, even when it resists direct introspection. Presenting a person with concrete cases and asking them to respond — then asking "why?" — progressively articulates implicit rules that the person uses reliably but has never verbalized. This is how much clinical and professional training makes expert intuition transferable.

How to do it

1. Collect ten to twenty concrete examples of a judgment you make regularly.
2. For each, write your decision and then ask yourself "why?" until you cannot go further.
3. Look for the pattern across cases: what variables are you implicitly tracking?
4. Test your articulated rule against a fresh case to see if it predicts your actual judgment.

Evidence

The "think-aloud" and case-based elicitation methods for surfacing expert knowledge are established in cognitive task analysis research; they reliably surface implicit decision criteria that experts cannot generate through direct introspection. (observational)

Elicited accounts are not always accurate representations of the underlying process — they are post-hoc constructions that approximate the real decision mechanism, not a direct read-out of it.

Sources

• Klein (1998), "Sources of Power: How People Make Decisions" (naturalistic decision making, RPD model)

Common mistake

Trying to surface tacit knowledge by asking "what is your rule for X?" rather than through cases — the direct question usually produces a platitude rather than the actual operative pattern.