Tacit knowledge is the knowledge that is not written down, it is inside peoples heads. It is knowledge that can be either conscious or subconscious and can be in the form of know-how, know-what or experiential. Ninety percent of what you need to know to be an innovator is in the form of tacit knowledge from other people you do not know. Getting this knowledge is the trick.

A Story

“An operating room is like a restaurant. In order for a good meal to be served, everything must come together. Everyone must do their part to get the meal just right and make sure that nothing interferes with the diner’s appreciation of the meal and their experience. It is best when the maitre’d, the sommelier, the chef, the waiters and the table attendants are barely noticed, they are just there when they are supposed to be with what the diner needs.”

These are the words of a surgeon describing what he desires an operating room to be like during surgery. It is a wonderful story, full of rich imagery and detail. By the way, can you guess what role the surgeon is in this story?

If you said the chef, the maestro in the kitchen exercising their artistic and creative talents, you’ll be sorely disappointed. If you said the diner, then give yourself a prize! Yes, this surgeon viewed himself as the person who was being served, who’s every need was satisfied with him making the minimum of effort. His view of himself as the diner (guess what dish the patient was!) provides the most vivid and valuable insight possible into this surgeon’s true needs and desires.

How do metaphor and analogy tell you about needs and desires? How can you take this vivid but unstructured story and turn it into something actionable?

Getting Under the Surface

The most important knowledge that an innovator, entrepreneur or businessperson needs to discover is how customers think and choose. This is knowledge that is not written down anywhere, that is inside people’s heads. It is knowledge that isn’t easy for people to articulate or to communicate clearly in surveys, questionnaires or focus groups. It is knowledge about the sub-conscious, about what our underlying needs and desires are, about the experiences we want to have and the outcomes we are seeking. It is knowledge that is best communicated by the stories we tell.

The vast majority of this meaningful knowledge that we seek falls through the cracks. It is not communicated or, if it is communicated, it is not captured, interpreted, or used in any meaningful manner. The Engagement Process is designed to fill these gaps. An effective Engagement Process

• Incorporates cognitive as well as behavioral attributes
• Focuses on both outcomes and experiences
• Develops both abstract and concrete insights, general and specific
• Uses the best and most vivid means that people have of communicating – stories and imagery

Stories are not enough. They are necessary but not sufficient. As anyone who has listened to someone telling a story, they are often undirected, rambling, and lacking in focus. The key is to direct the story arc and get the person you are engaging with to also get specific. What are the outcomes and experiences they desire? What are they satisfied with, how important is it to them? The way to get these items is with structure and direction.

The objective is to amplify the important aspects of the knowledge being gathered from the people being engaged. This information will be used to create personas – an amalgamation of a number of individuals into a common description of a certain type of customer that emphasizes the important cognitive attributes that will determine future adoption behavior.

Eliciting Knowledge Using Engagements

The objective of Engagements is to build both a robust knowledge resource as well as a knowledge pool. Engagements are conducted in a form similar to interviews, yet they are both more and less deterministic in their implementation.

They are less deterministic in that the tools for advancing the dialog are more open-ended and may in fact follow a different path with each engagee. This is in sharp contrast to statistical approaches to interviewing or surveys that use the law of large numbers to gauge average response. A fixed-question format is valuable when the context is also fixed, and known, by both parties in advance – such as for surveying buying habits or other behavioral lines of enquiry.

The Engagement process, however, is geared at discovering what leads to behavioral patterns:

• The root cause of behavior, and
• The dynamics of the community members.

There exist a number of tools to capture root cause including (LOCA, Laddering, Enlightened Hunter-Gatherer, Metaphor Elicitation, and others). These tools draw from widely accepted best practice in cognitive science, All approaches use a casual dialog format, yet all seek to find the ‘why’ behind each answer. Sometimes this is performed directly (e.g., laddering), and sometime indirectly (e.g., metaphor elicitation).

The objective of an engagement is to determine the explicit tacit needs and desires of the community member. We search for the reasons behind what is important and try to also find out the possibilities. While every engagement is inherently different because each person will focus on a different area, the facilitation guidance section of the community maps ensures some level of consistency between the engagements.

Engagement Methods

There are many techniques and methods for interacting with customers or potential customers to get at what their needs and desires are. In order to get at the underlying ‘whys’ of how they think and choose – the cognitive processes that are going on in their brains, it is necessary use a mechanism that allows the person to reveal their sub-conscious thoughts and feelings. Three techniques will be mentioned here – Metaphor Elicitation, Laddering and LOCA (Latent Observation, Constant Annoyance).

Asking for a Story – The Power of Metaphor
Stories are an excellent method for getting at the subconscious, but not just any story is good. Left to themselves, people often ramble, get off on tangents, skip important items or are just plain poor storytellers.

Laddering – The Why Chain
This is just the simple mechanism of asking ‘why?’

Latent Observation Constant Annoyance (LOCA)
This is storytelling with a twist. LOCA is one of the tools designed to recognize and understand individuals’ needs and desires. The tool is designed to determine what people find valuable. Amazingly enough, people are not very good at describing their wants. Most people live in a state of acceptance – being either apologists or survivors. They are often not even very good at reacting to things presented to them. The basic principles upon which this tool is based are:

• The role of community in defining value
• The behavior of people in different circumstances
• The use of simulation as a tool for understanding dynamics

The principle behind the constant annoyance process is that both the technology creators and the technology users can learn to adopt an altered state of interaction with the world for a period of time that will illuminate true needs and desires.

• State of Hypersensitivity

Negative – Hyper-critical, Hyper-annoyed
Positive – Hyper-credulous, Hyper-‘wowed’

• Projection – Observation and Role Playing

Self
Self in others shoes – Personas
Others

• Metaphor Elicitation and Induction

Antithesis of an interview or questionnaire

• Document

Feelings
Actions and Behaviors
Opinions

By recognizing each of these states, one is able to extract the needs and desires from the community members.

Gaining this knowledge is not always easy because people are very good at adopting to annoyance. Consider the act of typing. Anyone that learned to type originally on a typewriter (yes, there are a lot of us out there, even under the age of 30!) hit the space bar twice at the end of a sentence. This is an adopted solution because the typewriter could not be programmed to yield a larger space at the end of a sentence. But, when everyone switched over to using word processors, the extra space at the end of the sentence carried over. Does it really make sense to take an extra key stroke? Not really, but it is a very strong adaptation and continues on.