The Dilemma - Two Types of Knowledge

There are two types of knowledge: explicit and tacit. Explicit knowledge is what we encounter in books, formulas, and rules and can easily pass along from one person to another. Conventional knowledge gathering and learning techniques are geared towards this type of knowledge. It is crisp and factual and can be encoded into operating procedures and guidelines.

In real-world we encounter a different type of knowledge, tacit knowledge. This knowledge is the know-how gained through years of on-the-job experiential learning by experts in the field. It is usually acquired by hit-and trial and by observing episodes from a diverse set of experiences. It is also acquired by apprenticeship under more seasoned experts.

A simple example to illustrate will be: Knowledge of playing cards is explicit knowledge. However, knowledge of riding a bicycle is tacit knowledge.

Unlike explicit knowledge, tacit knowledge is not easy to capture, quantify, or even communicate. There are many reasons for this: The expert may not know what he knows. The expert may have more than one way to accomplish the same job. The expert may not be able to articulate his tacit knowledge in explicit knowledge vocabulary.

Tacit knowledge is an art-form. Yet, it is practiced by many professionals: doctors, lawyers, engineers, plant-operators; and at all levels: operational, tactical, and strategic.

When these tacit-knowledge workers leave, employers lose unsaid amounts of  intellectual  capital.

When knowledge engineering methods, which are meant for explicit knowledge elicitation, capture, and storage, are used for tacit knowledge they are unable to yield results.

MindModeler is a tool and method, based on cutting edge research on psychology and artificial intelligence, which overcomes these barriers. It accesses two primary areas of the mind: the semantic memory and the episodic memory and elicits information from them. The semantic memory is the area where we keep knowledge about factors and the relationships between those factors. The episodic memory is that area of the mind where we store information about past instances.

The MindModeler takes this information and builds robust mathematical models from it. These models can then be used as representations of the tacit knowledge of expert's expertise. Once computerized, the user interface allows interactive manipulations on these models namely:

• What-if analyses: what will be the outcome of changing multiple causes or stimuli?  - a type of simulation
• Goal-seeking: how to achieve a desired objective under constraints?
• Categorizations: What factors behave similarly in the model
• 2-D and 3-D Graphing: What are the relationships of the factors w.r.t. each other over their operating ranges?