The research about the human brain and behavior strongly suggests that most of the information processing we do in our brains including a substantial amount of decision making happens without ourselves being aware of it (in the sense that we can communicate such awareness). Libet’s experiment (see a Libet’s short delay) for instance shows that an action potential builds up in the brain up to half a second before we become aware of ourselves taking an action.

Other unrelated research suggests that a lot of the knowledge we use when performing familiar tasks is tacit knowledge, i.e. knowledge in a format that isn’t easily describable or communicable. So not only do we make subconscious decisions, we base those decisions on subconscious knowledge when we are really good at what we are doing. The natural development of competence has by several authors (the original source seems difficult to find) been described with the model in the exhibit below.

Competence stairs
The stages of competence development.

When discussing knowledge a distinction is often made between “knowing that” and “knowing how”. We know that 2 + 2 = 4 and we know how to add numbers. (In my native languages Finnish and Swedish there are actually, in contrast to common English, different words for these two types of knowledge. In Finnish we say “tietää” and “osata”, in Swedish “veta” and “kunna” – probably corresponding to the old English words “wit” and “ken”.)

The whole purpose of an operations manual is to describe and facilitate the build-up of know-how in the organization. The question is: How can we describe and disseminate know-how that in its most evolved form is unconscious? This is an other way of asking the questions put forth in an earlier post.

I still don’t have answers to the questions referred to above that I’m satisfied with but I’m convinced that we have to take into account how the human brain is wired.