Knowledge Transfer Problems: Why Sharing What You Know Is Harder Than You Think
In 2000, NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory discovered that many of its most experienced engineers were approaching retirement. These engineers carried decades of knowledge about spacecraft design, mission planning, and problem-solving--knowledge that was nowhere in the documentation because much of it had never been articulated. It existed in their heads, in their intuitions, in their ability to look at a design and sense that something was wrong before they could explain why. JPL launched an urgent knowledge-capture initiative, only to discover what organizations across every industry have learned: the most valuable knowledge is the hardest to transfer.
This challenge--the difficulty of moving knowledge from one person, context, or organization to another--is one of the most consequential and most underestimated problems in education, business, and institutional life. We treat knowledge as if it were a substance that can be poured from one container to another: write it down, read it, done. But knowledge is not a substance. It is a complex mental structure that is deeply embedded in context, experience, and practice. Transferring it is not like copying a file. It is like transplanting a tree--the roots go deeper than you think, the soil matters more than you expect, and the survival rate is lower than you hope.
What Is Knowledge Transfer?
Knowledge transfer is the process of moving knowledge from one person, context, or organization to another so that it can be effectively used in the new setting. This sounds straightforward, but the apparent simplicity masks profound complexity.
Explicit vs. Tacit Knowledge
The most important distinction in understanding knowledge transfer problems is the distinction between explicit knowledge and tacit knowledge, introduced by philosopher Michael Polanyi and developed by organizational theorists Ikujiro Nonaka and Hirotaka Takeuchi.
Explicit knowledge is knowledge that can be articulated, documented, and transmitted through language:
- Facts, data, and information
- Procedures, processes, and algorithms
- Rules, policies, and guidelines
- Formulas, models, and theories
- Written instructions and manuals
Explicit knowledge is relatively easy to transfer. You can write it down, read it, store it in a database, and transmit it electronically. Most of what we think of when we think about "knowledge" is explicit knowledge.
Tacit knowledge is knowledge that resides in practice, experience, and intuition and resists explicit articulation:
- The experienced doctor's ability to sense that a patient is deteriorating before the vital signs change
- The master carpenter's feel for when wood is about to split
- The seasoned negotiator's intuition about when to push and when to concede
- The expert programmer's pattern recognition that identifies the likely source of a bug before any debugging
- The veteran teacher's ability to read a classroom and know that students are confused even when no one asks a question
Tacit knowledge is enormously valuable--often more valuable than explicit knowledge--and enormously difficult to transfer. Polanyi captured this with his famous observation: "We know more than we can tell."
Why Tacit Knowledge Matters
Research consistently shows that tacit knowledge accounts for the majority of expert performance in most domains. Experts do not outperform novices primarily because they know more facts. They outperform because they have developed patterns, intuitions, and judgment that allow them to perceive situations differently, prioritize differently, and respond differently--and most of this knowledge is tacit.
When an organization loses an expert (to retirement, departure, or death), the explicit knowledge may be recoverable from documentation. The tacit knowledge walks out the door and may never be recovered.
Why Is Knowledge Transfer Difficult?
Knowledge transfer fails for several identifiable reasons, each operating at a different level.
1. The Tacit Dimension
The most fundamental barrier is that much of what experts know cannot be articulated. This is not because experts are bad communicators. It is because tacit knowledge is stored in neural patterns, procedural memory, and perceptual schemas that operate below conscious access.
A chess grandmaster cannot fully explain how they evaluate a position. They can articulate some factors (material balance, king safety, pawn structure) but much of their evaluation is pattern recognition that operates faster than conscious analysis and draws on thousands of previously encountered positions. Asking the grandmaster to transfer this knowledge through documentation is like asking them to document the pattern-matching process of their visual cortex--the knowledge is real and powerful, but it is not accessible to conscious articulation.
2. Context Dependence
Knowledge is not context-free. It is deeply embedded in the specific situation, environment, and conditions in which it was developed and used:
- A manufacturing technique that works perfectly with one material may fail with a different material
- A management approach that succeeds in one organizational culture may fail in another
- A teaching method that works with one student population may not work with a different one
- A software design pattern that works at one scale may break at another
When knowledge is transferred from one context to another, critical contextual information is often lost, and the knowledge fails to function in the new setting. The recipient may follow the procedure exactly but get different results because the unrecognized contextual factors are different.
3. The Curse of Knowledge
The curse of knowledge is a cognitive bias in which experts cannot reconstruct what it was like to not know what they now know. This makes them systematically poor at identifying what information novices need:
- Experts omit steps that they perform unconsciously
- Experts use jargon without realizing it is jargon
- Experts assume background knowledge that novices do not have
- Experts skip over "obvious" connections that are not obvious to non-experts
- Experts underestimate the difficulty of tasks they find easy
The curse of knowledge means that the people who know the most are often the worst at communicating what they know, not because of any communication skill deficit but because of a fundamental cognitive asymmetry between expert and novice perspectives.
4. Motivation and Incentive Problems
Knowledge transfer requires effort from both the knowledge holder and the knowledge recipient, and incentives often work against transfer:
- Knowledge as power: In many organizations, having unique knowledge gives individuals job security, influence, and irreplaceability. Sharing that knowledge eliminates these advantages.
- Time pressure: Knowledge transfer takes time, and both experts and novices are typically under pressure to produce immediate output rather than invest in long-term knowledge building
- Recognition failure: Organizations that do not recognize or reward knowledge sharing create incentive structures that discourage it
- Trust deficits: Effective knowledge transfer requires psychological safety (the willingness to ask "stupid" questions, admit confusion, and make mistakes), which is absent in many organizational cultures
5. Medium Limitations
Different knowledge transfer media have different limitations:
| Medium | Explicit Knowledge | Tacit Knowledge | Scale | Cost |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Documentation | Good for procedures and facts | Very poor | High | Low per recipient |
| Lectures/presentations | Good for concepts | Poor | High | Moderate |
| One-on-one mentoring | Good | Good | Very low (one person at a time) | Very high |
| Apprenticeship | Excellent | Excellent | Very low | Very high |
| Communities of practice | Good | Moderate | Moderate | Moderate |
| Knowledge databases | Good for structured data | Very poor | High | High to build |
| Video/demonstration | Good | Moderate (captures visible behavior) | High | Moderate |
What's the Curse of Knowledge in Transfer?
The curse of knowledge deserves detailed examination because it is the single most common cause of knowledge transfer failure in practice.
How the Curse Works
When you know something, your brain automatically integrates that knowledge into your perception of the world. You literally cannot see the world the way you saw it before you knew. When an expert looks at a circuit diagram, they automatically see the functional blocks, the signal flow, and the potential failure points. A novice looking at the same diagram sees a confusing tangle of lines and symbols. The expert cannot remember what the confusing tangle looked like because their brain has overwritten that perception with the expert perception.
Classic Demonstrations
The psychologists Elizabeth Newton and Chip Heath demonstrated the curse of knowledge through a simple experiment: "tappers" tapped the rhythm of well-known songs (like "Happy Birthday") on a table while "listeners" tried to identify the songs. Tappers estimated that listeners would identify about 50% of the songs. In reality, listeners identified only 2.5%.
The tappers could not help hearing the melody in their heads as they tapped. They could not imagine hearing only the rhythmically ambiguous taps that the listeners actually heard. The tappers' knowledge of the melody made it impossible for them to experience the taps as the listeners experienced them.
This is exactly what happens in every knowledge transfer situation. The expert hears the melody. The novice hears only taps. And the expert cannot understand why the novice does not hear the melody, because the expert cannot turn off their own knowledge.
Consequences for Knowledge Transfer
The curse produces systematic transfer failures:
- Documentation that is incomprehensible to anyone who does not already know what it documents
- Training that skips critical steps that the trainer performs unconsciously
- Explanations that assume vocabulary the learner has not acquired
- Feedback that is too abstract because the expert cannot identify what specific knowledge the learner is missing
- Frustration on both sides: the expert frustrated that the learner "doesn't get it"; the learner frustrated that the expert "can't explain it"
How Do You Transfer Tacit Knowledge?
Tacit knowledge cannot be transferred through documentation or lectures. It must be transferred through methods that involve shared practice, observation, and experiential learning.
Apprenticeship
The oldest and most effective method for transferring tacit knowledge is apprenticeship--extended, structured learning alongside an expert practitioner. Apprenticeship works because:
- The apprentice observes the expert performing in real contexts, absorbing patterns that cannot be articulated
- The expert provides real-time feedback on the apprentice's performance
- Learning occurs through legitimate peripheral participation (starting with simple tasks and gradually taking on more complex ones)
- The apprentice develops their own tacit knowledge through practice under expert guidance
Mentoring
Less structured than apprenticeship, mentoring involves an experienced practitioner guiding a less experienced one through regular interaction:
- Discussing challenging situations and how to approach them
- Reviewing the mentee's work and providing developmental feedback
- Sharing stories that illustrate important principles and judgment calls
- Being available for questions and consultation
Communities of Practice
Communities of practice (a concept developed by Etienne Wenger) are groups of practitioners who share a domain of interest and learn from each other through regular interaction:
- Sharing stories of successes and failures
- Collaboratively solving problems
- Developing shared vocabulary and frameworks
- Maintaining collective memory of lessons learned
Deliberate Practice with Feedback
Tacit knowledge develops through practice with feedback--doing the work, making errors, and receiving correction that guides improvement. This is why medical training includes residencies (years of supervised practice), why musicians practice for thousands of hours, and why skilled trades require years of on-the-job learning.
Why Do Knowledge Databases Fail?
Organizations frequently invest in knowledge management systems--databases, wikis, intranets--designed to capture and distribute organizational knowledge. These systems consistently underperform expectations, for several predictable reasons.
They Capture Only Explicit Knowledge
Knowledge databases are designed for explicit knowledge: procedures, data, documents, and structured information. They are structurally incapable of capturing the tacit knowledge that constitutes the most valuable organizational knowledge. The system captures what can be written down and misses what cannot.
They Lack Context
Knowledge in a database is decontextualized--stripped of the situational information that determined its meaning and applicability. A database entry that says "use technique X for problem Y" does not capture the conditions under which X works, the conditions under which it fails, the judgment required to determine whether the current situation matches Y closely enough, or the modifications needed for variations.
They Become Outdated
Knowledge changes as practices evolve, tools change, and contexts shift. Database entries that were accurate when written may be outdated, misleading, or wrong months or years later. Maintaining currency requires continuous effort that is rarely funded or incentivized.
They Are Not Consulted
Even when knowledge databases contain useful information, people often do not consult them. The effort of searching, reading, and evaluating database content competes with the easier alternative of asking a colleague, and the colleague provides not just the answer but the context, judgment, and tacit knowledge that the database cannot.
They Cannot Replace Experience
Fundamental to the failure of knowledge databases is the assumption that knowledge can be extracted from knowers, stored in a system, and implanted in new knowers. This assumption misunderstands the nature of knowledge. Knowledge is not a commodity that can be warehoused and distributed. It is a capacity that must be developed through experience, and no database can substitute for the process of development.
What Enables Better Knowledge Transfer?
Despite the inherent difficulties, knowledge transfer can be significantly improved through deliberate strategies.
1. Invest Time
Knowledge transfer is slow. There are no shortcuts for developing tacit knowledge. Organizations that allocate adequate time for mentoring, apprenticeship, and communities of practice get better transfer outcomes than those that expect transfer to happen through documentation alone.
2. Create Psychological Safety
People need to feel safe asking questions, admitting ignorance, and making mistakes in order to learn effectively. Organizations with high psychological safety--where it is acceptable to say "I don't understand" without penalty--have significantly better knowledge transfer than organizations where such admissions are risky.
3. Use Multiple Channels
Effective knowledge transfer combines multiple methods:
- Documentation for explicit knowledge that can be written down
- Mentoring for judgment, intuition, and contextual knowledge
- Practice with feedback for skill development
- Communities of practice for collective knowledge maintenance
- Stories and case studies for pattern recognition and situational awareness
4. Make Knowledge Transfer a Priority
Organizations that explicitly value, measure, and reward knowledge sharing--that make it part of performance evaluation, that recognize mentors and teachers, that allocate time and resources for transfer activities--achieve better outcomes than those that treat transfer as something that should happen naturally.
5. Recognize That Transfer Is Slow
The most important enabler of better knowledge transfer may be the most difficult: accepting that developing expertise takes time and that there is no technology, no database, and no documentation system that can compress years of experience into weeks of reading. The organizations and institutions that accept this reality and invest accordingly achieve the best transfer outcomes. Those that seek shortcuts get shallow transfer that fails under pressure.
References and Further Reading
Polanyi, M. (1966). The Tacit Dimension. Doubleday. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tacit_Dimension
Nonaka, I. & Takeuchi, H. (1995). The Knowledge-Creating Company: How Japanese Companies Create the Dynamics of Innovation. Oxford University Press. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Knowledge-Creating_Company
Wenger, E. (1998). Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning, and Identity. Cambridge University Press. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Community_of_practice
Heath, C. & Heath, D. (2007). Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die. Random House. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Made_to_Stick
Lave, J. & Wenger, E. (1991). Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation. Cambridge University Press. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legitimate_peripheral_participation
Davenport, T.H. & Prusak, L. (1998). Working Knowledge: How Organizations Manage What They Know. Harvard Business School Press. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knowledge_management
Argote, L. (2013). Organizational Learning: Creating, Retaining and Transferring Knowledge. 2nd ed. Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-5251-5
Collins, H.M. (2010). Tacit and Explicit Knowledge. University of Chicago Press. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tacit_knowledge
Szulanski, G. (1996). "Exploring Internal Stickiness: Impediments to the Transfer of Best Practice Within the Firm." Strategic Management Journal, 17(S2), 27-43. https://doi.org/10.1002/smj.4250171105
Camerer, C., Loewenstein, G., & Weber, M. (1989). "The Curse of Knowledge in Economic Settings." Journal of Political Economy, 97(5), 1232-1254. https://doi.org/10.1086/261651
Eraut, M. (2000). "Non-formal Learning and Tacit Knowledge in Professional Work." British Journal of Educational Psychology, 70(1), 113-136. https://doi.org/10.1348/000709900158001