Most of us sense, somewhere, that we know more than we can say. The mechanic who hears the fault before she finds it, the nurse who senses a patient is “off” before the monitors agree, the manager who reads a room in three seconds. This essay follows a long conversation in philosophy and organisation theory about that kind of knowing: where it comes from, why it resists being turned into a manual, and what it means to study it honestly rather than wish it away.
Starting with a puzzle
Here is something worth sitting with. You can ride a bicycle, but if I asked you to write down the rules of balance you are following, you would struggle, and a person who memorised your answer still could not ride. You can recognise a friend’s face in a crowd without being able to list the features you used. A seasoned negotiator walks into a meeting and, within moments, knows which way it will go, though if pressed she might only say “you get a feel for it.”
What kind of knowledge is this? It is real. It guides skilled action better than any checklist. Yet it lives in doing, in the body, in accumulated encounters, rather than in sentences. For a long time, both science and management treated this sort of knowing as second-rate: useful, perhaps, but not yet proper knowledge until it could be made explicit and written into a procedure. A persistent line of thinkers disagreed. They argued that experience is not the raw material we refine into knowledge later. Experience is itself a way of knowing, with its own structure and its own dignity. This essay traces that argument, from the philosophers who first noticed it to the organisation scholars who built careers on it, and then asks the hard question any thoughtful reader will already be forming: if knowing lives in experience, and experience is so personal, how do we keep this from collapsing into “everyone has their own truth”?
What the philosophers noticed
The idea is old. Aristotle (350 BCE/2009) separated three kinds of knowing. There is episteme, the knowledge of things that could not be otherwise, the domain of proof. There is techne, the know-how of the craftsman. And there is phronesis, practical wisdom: the ability to judge well what to do in a particular, messy situation. Phronesis, Aristotle thought, cannot be downloaded from a textbook. It grows through empeiria, the slow accumulation of cases until your perception itself becomes trained. The expert does not apply more rules than the novice. She sees the situation differently.
Centuries later, the American pragmatists gave this intuition a modern shape. William James (1912) argued that we experience not just isolated things but the relations between them, the “and,” the “with,” the “leads to.” John Dewey pushed further. In Experience and Nature (1925), he described experience not as something that happens inside a private mind but as a transaction, a back-and-forth between a living creature and its world, a rhythm of doing and then undergoing the consequences. Knowing, for Dewey, is what happens when that smooth transaction breaks down and we have to inquire our way back to balance. In Art as Experience (1934) he showed how the richest experiences are the ones that come to a satisfying whole. The lesson for organisations is direct: we learn most from the moments when our habits stop working.
A parallel European tradition, phenomenology, arrived at a similar place by a different road. Edmund Husserl (1936/1970) warned that modern science had forgotten the Lebenswelt, the everyday “lifeworld” of lived experience that all its abstractions secretly rest on. Martin Heidegger (1927/1962) made the point unforgettable with a hammer. Most of the time, he observed, we do not study our tools; we simply use them, absorbed, and in that use they almost disappear. “The less we just stare at the hammer-Thing, and the more we seize hold of it and use it, the more primordial does our relationship to it become” (Heidegger, 1962, p. 98). We notice the hammer as an object only when it breaks. Skilled coping comes first; detached analysis comes second, and usually only when something has gone wrong. Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1945/1962) added the body. Perception is not a brain receiving signals from a passive vehicle; it is a trained body taking up its world. “The body is our general medium for having a world” (Merleau-Ponty, 1962, p. 169).
Two German words capture a distinction that organisation scholars later found very useful. Wilhelm Dilthey (1883/1989) contrasted Erlebnis, immediate, vivid, in-the-moment lived experience, with Erfahrung, experience that has been digested over time into understanding (what he called Verstehen). Hans-Georg Gadamer (1960/1989) sharpened it beautifully: real Erfahrung is not just piling up events but being corrected by them. We have a genuine experience precisely when reality refuses to match our expectations and forces us to revise. On this view, an “experienced” person is not someone who has seen a lot, but someone who has been changed by what they have seen.
The thinker who tied all of this most usefully to management was Michael Polanyi. In The Tacit Dimension (1966) he opened with a line that has launched a thousand citations: “we can know more than we can tell” (Polanyi, 1966, p. 4). Beneath every explicit rule we can state, Polanyi argued, sits a foundation of tacit knowing, the skills and perceptions we rely on without being able to spell them out. And this is not a flaw to be engineered away. It is the ground that makes all the explicit stuff usable in the first place, and it deepens, rather than shrinks, as we become expert.
When management caught up
Organisation theory took a while to absorb this, and when it did, the effect was a quiet revolution in how we think about learning and knowledge at work.
David Kolb (1984) gave managers a memorable picture: the experiential learning cycle, in which we move from a concrete experience, to reflecting on it, to forming a general idea, to testing that idea in action, which produces the next experience. Learning, on this view, is a loop that has to pass through lived doing, not a transfer of facts from a teacher’s head to a student’s.
Donald Schön (1983) struck harder at the prevailing assumption that good practice is just applied theory. Watching architects, therapists, and engineers, he noticed that real problems rarely arrive as the neat textbook cases professionals were trained on. Experts cope through what he called knowing-in-action, a fluent competence built into the doing itself, and reflection-in-action, the ability to think on their feet and adjust mid-performance. The cleverness is in the practice, not upstream of it.
From Japan came another influential idea. Ikujiro Nonaka (1994) took Polanyi’s tacit-versus-explicit distinction and asked how organisations create new knowledge. His answer, the SECI model, described knowledge as cycling between tacit and explicit forms (socialisation, externalisation, combination, internalisation), with the tacit, experience-soaked kind serving as the wellspring of genuine innovation. The strategic punchline was striking: a firm’s most valuable knowledge may be exactly the part competitors cannot copy, because it cannot be fully written down.
Karl Weick (1995) approached experience from yet another angle, through sensemaking. People in organisations, he argued, do not simply react to a ready-made environment. They notice some cues and not others, tell themselves a plausible story about what is going on, and then act in ways that help bring that very situation into being, a process he called enactment. We make sense looking backward, from inside the flow of experience, and our actions help create the world we then have to make sense of.
By the late 1990s the underlying shift had a name. Scott Cook and John Seely Brown (1999) distinguished an epistemology of possession, knowledge as something you have, from an epistemology of practice, knowing as something you do, and insisted that the two need each other in a “generative dance.” Wanda Orlikowski (2002) showed this concretely, tracing how a geographically scattered product-development organisation held a shared capability together not in any database but in continuous, coordinated practice. Earlier, Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger (1991) had reframed learning itself as social: newcomers learn through legitimate peripheral participation, edging into a community’s real work until its know-how becomes theirs. Drawing on Julian Orr’s study of Xerox repair technicians, John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid (1991) made the point vivid: the official repair manuals consistently failed the technicians, who actually solved problems through swapped stories and shared experience the manuals could not hold.
Studying knowing where it actually lives
If knowing lives in practice, then to study it you have to go where practice happens. By the early 2000s this conviction had hardened into what Schatzki, Knorr-Cetina, and von Savigny (2001) named the practice turn: the move to treat shared, recurring activities, rather than individuals or abstract structures, as the basic unit of social life. Davide Nicolini (2012) later mapped this terrain for organisation researchers, recommending that we “zoom in” on the fine grain of an activity and “zoom out” to the wider arrangements that hold it in place.
Silvia Gherardi (2006) gave the approach one of its most useful images. Knowing-in-practice, she argued, has a texture: it is woven across people, tools, bodies, and places, not stored in any single head. Antonio Strati (1999) opened a door the others had left shut, to the senses. His notion of sensible knowledge names what the skilled craftsperson knows through sight, sound, touch, and smell, the chef who hears that the pan is wrong, the inspector who feels that a weld is bad. Much of what experts know is aesthetic in this literal sense, and our usual research instruments, the survey and the structured interview, walk straight past it.
How, then, do you catch it? Jörgen Sandberg (2000) offered a model. Studying engine optimisers at Volvo, he found that the more competent workers did not simply hold more facts; they experienced the job differently, organised around a richer sense of what the work was for. Competence, in other words, is a way of seeing, and you find it by carefully reconstructing how people experience their work, not by ticking off their attributes. Sandberg and Tsoukas (2011) built this into a broader argument that much management theory fails because it reasons in the abstract, detached language of the spectator, when practice runs on a different logic in which actor and situation are bound together, each shaping the other.
Bent Flyvbjerg (2001) drew the boldest conclusion. Social science, he argued, keeps embarrassing itself by trying to imitate physics, chasing context-free laws it never delivers. It should instead embrace its real strength, phronetic inquiry in Aristotle’s sense: careful, value-aware study of real cases that asks not only “what is true” but “who gains, who loses, and is this desirable?” The case study, far from being soft, becomes the discipline’s sharpest tool. In strategy research, Richard Whittington (2006) brought the same spirit home with a simple framing: strategy is not something a firm has but something people do, made of praxis (the actual activity), practices (the shared routines they draw on), and practitioners (the people doing it). Robert Chia and Robin Holt (2009) went furthest, borrowing Heidegger’s contrast between building (deliberate, planned action) and dwelling (the absorbed, ongoing coping of people at home in their work) to argue that much effective strategy is not designed at all. It accumulates, quietly, from countless small adjustments nobody labelled “strategic” at the time. And throughout this body of work, Ann Cunliffe (2004) insists on one discipline in particular: researchers must be reflexive, alert to how their own involvement shapes what they see, treating that involvement not as contamination to be scrubbed out but as a source of understanding.
The objection you have already thought of
By now a sceptical reader, especially one trained in measurement, is uneasy, and rightly so. If knowing is personal, embodied, tacit, and bound to its situation, what stops “experience as a method” from sliding into “everyone has their own truth, and no one can be told they are wrong”? This is the serious challenge, and the honest thing is that the literature does not pretend to make it vanish. It offers three real answers instead.
The first is community. Gherardi (2006) points out that knowing-in-practice is never private. A community of practitioners holds standards, and members are accountable to them. A weld is judged good or bad by other welders, a diagnosis by other clinicians. The check on any individual’s claim is the shared, observable judgement of people who do the same work, not a feeling in someone’s head.
The second is fidelity. A phenomenological account, Sandberg and Tsoukas (2011) argue, is not just one researcher’s impression. It is a disciplined attempt to describe, as accurately as possible, the structure of how something is actually experienced, and accounts can be more or less faithful to that structure. That faithfulness is a standard others can examine and contest. It is intersubjective, not merely subjective.
The third is consequence. Flyvbjerg (2001) revives the old pragmatist test (visible already in Dewey, 1925): judge knowledge by what it does. Phronetic work earns its keep not by generalising to a statistical population but by illuminating real situations clearly enough to sharpen the practical judgement of the people who read it. None of these three answers delivers the kind of proof a laboratory promises. What they show is that abandoning the lab’s standard does not mean abandoning rigour. It means a different kind of rigour: be explicit about your criteria, careful in your method, and honest about the reach of your claims.
Why it matters
It would be easy to read all this as a licence to relax, to call any hunch “tacit knowledge” and any anecdote “research.” That is the opposite of the point. The argument is not that rigour is unnecessary; it is that the popular picture of knowledge, as something explicit, codified, and shippable from one head to another, quietly leaves out most of what makes organisations actually work. It leaves out the trained eye of the expert, the shared habits of a team, the backward-looking sense-making by which a company decides what just happened to it, and the practical wisdom that good strategy turns out to require.
For researchers, that has a clear consequence. Case studies, ethnographies, close interviews, and reflective inquiry are not the soft cousins of “real” science. For questions whose answers live in practice, they are the right tools. For the rest of us, managers and curious readers alike, the lesson is more personal, and it returns to Gadamer (1960/1989). Experience does not deepen just by accumulating years. It deepens when we let what happens to us correct us, when we treat the moments our expectations break not as failures but as the exact places learning begins. That is a more demanding idea of experience than the one printed on most CVs. It may also be the truer one.
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