If you're not reading this because you know me, allow me to introduce myself: my name is Alicia Cassels, and I'm the Chief Operating Officer at LeadersAtlas. I've had the opportunity to observe how organizations from scaling startups, to community groups, to Fortune 500 companies can capture and share the knowledge that makes them succeed.
At Babson College, I studied Entrepreneurship and Strategic Management, where my interest in what makes organizations thrive was sparked. My work at LeadersAtlas centers on creating scalable systems informed by research like what I'm exploring in today's article.
I believe that the untapped expertise in organizations and institutions presents a massive opportunity to create and scale value; that is, if we can tap into it and use it properly. My goal is that this article articulates my latest thinking about how we can do this and spark conversation surrounding applications of the technology we are developing.
CLAIM: Organizations possess more expertise than they can articulate, with their most valuable knowledge often locked within the minds of their top performers. As a result, companies and institutions are only meeting a fraction of their potential for success and resiliency.
As information is shared, processed, and recorded faster than ever across organizations today, companies (even large, successful ones) are still failing to capture and leverage a key type of knowledge known as tacit knowledge: the intuitive expertise that exists below the surface of conscious awareness but drives exceptional performance.
The concept of tacit knowledge was a threshold learning for me; it changed the way I see how expertise is gained and utilized in our everyday lives.
The key to unlocking this particular form of knowledge lies in an understanding that your top performers who possess it often cannot articulate how they know what they know without specialized elicitation techniques.
According to Gary Klein's research on Naturalistic Decision Making (NDM), top performers don't actually compare multiple options when making decisions, but instead unconsciously recognize patterns based on extensive experience - a process impossible to capture through traditional knowledge management approaches.
Intuition is not just a mystical feeling; it's a non-conscious form of knowledge that arises from patterns and experience. (Gary Klein, "Sources of Power")
Research on Applied Cognitive Task Analysis (ACTA) combined with strategic storytelling reveals a powerful methodology to discover, articulate, and scale the unique thought processes that drive exceptional results. In this article, we'll explore what companies are missing, what's at stake, and how we as team leaders can begin to bridge the gap.
How Traditional Approaches Fall Short
Most organizational knowledge transfer efforts focus exclusively on what experts do, completely missing how they think. Traditional approaches like standard operating procedures, how-to manuals, sales playbooks, templates, and training programs capture only explicit knowledge, missing the cognitive expertise that differentiates true experts from competent performers.
The reason conventional knowledge capture methods fail is because they overlook the cognitive elements like pattern recognition, mental simulation, anomaly detection, and contextual decision factors. The application of tacit knowledge is often precisely what differentiates success from failure in high-context, high-stakes environments.
But eliciting this information isn't trivial. Tacit knowledge isn't the kind of thing that's easy for top performers to recognize within themselves, let alone share in a way that can be used by others in the organization. Michael Polanyi, a philosopher whose work on tacit knowledge in the 1950s established the foundation for modern expertise research, famously observed that "we can know more than we can tell." This is bad news for businesses who rely on their top performers' expertise. The inability to "tell" translates directly to business risk.
We know more than we can tell (Michale Polanyi)
The Cost of Neglecting Tacit Knowledge Transfer
Organizations that fail to systematically capture tacit knowledge face significant strategic vulnerabilities. When expertise remains locked in the minds of individual performers, it creates structural fragility within teams and limits growth potential. The consequences extend beyond lost information - they represent missed competitive advantages, wasted resources, and unnecessary constraints on organizational potential.
The invisible nature of tacit knowledge amplifies these challenges. When experts leave, retire, or are unavailable, critical knowledge doesn't just become temporarily inaccessible, it often disappears entirely. Traditional knowledge management approaches fall short because they focus almost exclusively on documenting the explicit dimensions of knowledge while missing the implicit cognitive patterns, mental models, and perceptual skills that truly drive expert performance.
This knowledge gap manifests in two primary organizational risks that demand attention:
Risk 1: Single Point of Failure
Reflect: can you think of a time a top performer was retained at great length by management, despite negative consequences to the rest of the team? Many organizations erode team culture hanging onto those who have succeeded based on their tacit knowledge but fail to meet other important organizational needs (collaboration, values fit, etc.).
When organizations fail to extract and distribute tacit knowledge, they create dangerous dependencies on individual experts. This leads to bottlenecks in decision-making, vulnerability to sudden departures, and the inability to scale successful approaches beyond a handful of top performers. The impact is often felt most acutely during transitions, when critical institutional knowledge walks out the door with departing experts. I'd argue that this is why a lot of mergers & acquisitions, reorganization initiatives, and transformation projects fail.
If you want to avoid this trap, you have to implement systematic expertise extraction processes before key departures occur. This means regular knowledge capture sessions, creating scenarios that reveal expert thinking patterns, and building communities of practice where tacit knowledge can be shared through guided interactions. The goal isn't to replace experts, but to distribute their knowledge so the organization becomes resilient to inevitable personnel changes.
Risk 2: Failure to Scale
Reflect: can you think of a time that you were at a growing organization and thought, "man, if only we could hire more people who could do what [insert top performer's name here] does!" Many organizations fail to scale trying to find the look-alikes to top performers, but they're hiring on a false sense of what's important, derived from observable behaviors and characteristics, instead of accelerating the adoption of tacit knowledge.
When organizations fail to properly identify what makes their top performers successful, they waste resources on ineffective hiring and training. They focus on observable traits or credentials rather than the underlying cognitive patterns that drive results. This leads to frustrated new hires who never receive the guidance they need, and plateauing growth as the organization hits the natural limits of its tacit knowledge distribution.
If you want to mitigate this, you have to focus on making the invisible visible. Document the mental models and decision frameworks of your top performers are using. Then, integrate these insights into onboarding processes, training programs, and mentoring relationships. Rather than hoping to find carbon copies of your stars, build systems that accelerate the development of expertise in a diverse talent pool by giving them access to the thinking patterns that actually drive success.
How Applied Cognitive Task Analysis Can Help
Applied Cognitive Task Analysis (ACTA) provides a structured method of extracting the cognitive elements that drive expert performance. Developed Militello & Hutton in 1998, ACTA was designed to be accessible to practitioners without extensive cognitive psychology backgrounds.
The methodology employs three interview techniques that progressively uncover hidden expertise:
- Task diagram interviews - helps experts break down complex activities into major steps while identifying which aspects demand the most cognitive effort
- Knowledge audits - probe to elicit specific types of expertise such as pattern recognition, situational awareness, improvising solutions, and anticipating problems
- Simulation interviews - present challenging scenarios to observe expertise in action, capturing how experts assess situations, identify relevant cues, and determine appropriate responses
The output of this process is a cognitive demands table documenting difficult elements, why they're challenging, errors newbies make, and strategies experts use.
According to Klein's findings with fireground commanders in 1989, these expert strategies often operate at an intuitive level, with commanders making rapid decisions through pattern recognition rather than comparing multiple options as traditional decision theory suggested.
The most valuable insight I have made about how people make decisions is that when they become skilled they don't have to make decisions - choices between options. Instead, they can draw on experience and patterns they have acquired to recognize what to do. (Gary Klein, "Sources of Power")
While ACTA has made these methods of extracting expertise more accessible, it still requires a fair amount of expertise to do it correctly. The responsibility of knowledge capture is primarily on the team leader to ensure the viability and continuity of their team, while sometimes bolstered by HR from a training perspective, sales enablement for a sales team, or in more advanced organizations something like a Chief Learning Officer.
Where Storytelling Comes In
While ACTA provides powerful frameworks for extracting tacit knowledge, it can feel intimidatingly scientific for those without specialized training. The good news? You don't need to become a cognitive psychologist to unlock expertise in your organization. Storytelling offers an accessible entry point that dramatically enhances knowledge extraction.
We all understand the power of a story, and most leaders I’ve met will explicitly acknowledge the skill of storytelling and the role it plays in leadership. I even took a class at Babson called "Business Storytelling" with Stephen Spinelli and Kristen Getchell where we spent a whole semester studying how business leaders employ storytelling to motivate, inspire, and sell. In addition to observing guest speakers of entrepreneurs telling their stories, we studied works like Kindra Hall's "Stories that Stick" and Nancy Duarte's "Resonate" - all pointing to the efficacy of storytelling because of its ability not only to communicate otherwise difficult to share knowledge (which I now understand to be tacit knowledge), but also to help audiences remember and recall the knowledge when they need to use it. This makes storytelling a prime method for tacit knowledge recall and transfer.
When experts share stories about challenging situations they've faced, they naturally reveal their perceptual cues, mental models, and decision strategies without the artificial constraints of direct questioning. These narratives provide context that gives meaning to facts and procedures, preserving the situational nuances that define expertise.
The integration of storytelling with ACTA leverages this power through several techniques:
- Critical Decision Method (CDM) interviews ask experts to recount challenging incidents and then probe their thought processes at key decision points
- Story-driven knowledge audits expand traditional approaches with prompts like "tell me about a time when..." to evoke rich narratives containing tacit knowledge
- Collaborative story mapping creates visual representations that include both procedural elements and embedded stories illustrating key decisions
According to research on organizational storytelling by Sole and Wilson (2002), narrative approaches build trust, cultivate norms, transfer tacit knowledge, facilitate unlearning, and generate emotional connections - all critical elements for effective expertise transfer.
Implementing Expertise Extraction in Organizations
I've conducted discovery interviews with over 50 leaders at various sizes/types of organizations asking them about the idea of storytelling and knowledge transfer at their organizations. Almost all of them attested to the use of storytelling on their teams and in their leadership. They make space for sharing success stories in departmental meetings, offsite events, kickoffs, and all-employee meetings. And they keep doing it because they see real benefits: team members feel recognized, motivated, inspired, and learn from one another. They're able to lift up behaviors they want to see in their team as examples and promote more of that behavior.
But they are only scratching the surface of what's become possible. These injections into team cadences are great, but they only go so deep, and they only last so long. The insights aren't being systematically captured, analyzed, or integrated into the organization's DNA.
Some leaders recognize this opportunity, and they want to go further. Our clients have been those types of leaders.
So for the past 5+ years, LeadersAtlas has been conducting story-centric, expertise-driven interviews with top performers at companies like HP and IDC. Conducting a light version of ACTA, we've helped facilitate more than 150 "skillshare" presentations helping organizations uncover and activate their top people's skills.
But we were still so limited. The interviews took a lot of time to get deep enough and get right. We could only do so many. Selection bias was at play on who to interview. We knew we were only scratching the surface with these interviews and presentations. While we saw great results in recognition and team performance, we needed to go further.
A New Frontier for Tacit Knowledge in the Age of AI
The research and our experience on tacit knowledge is clear: it's highly valuable, and pretty difficult to extract. Practitioners of CTA methods spend hours interviewing experts, taking them away from result-producing activities at high cost, even if the return makes sense in the long-run.
But what if it didn't have to be this way?
At LeadersAtlas, we are pioneering a new application of this research that integrates AI to create a scalable system for ACTA with storytelling at the forefront. Our developing platform, Mosaic, captures the tactical knowledge that drives success in complex enterprise environments, making it accessible to entire teams when they need it most.
By combining structured knowledge capture methodologies with advanced AI, we're helping organizations transform the hidden expertise of top performers into a sustainable competitive advantage.
Here's the idea: what if we could perform ACTA-style interviews on your entire team, at scale, in a 60-minute workshop?
We've already piloted this at a few companies with increasingly higher-quality results, and we're looking to pilot this approach with new organizations. If you're curious, or otherwise want to learn more, reach out to me here on LinkedIn or via email at alicia@leadersatlas.com.
