Crowdsourcing the corporate brain: Closing polanyi’s paradox on the frontline
Polymath Michael Polanyi famously noted, “We can know more than we can tell,” a paradox that’s now showing up and being solved on the warehouse and retail floor.
Frontline workers possess deep, tacit knowledge of how operations run, mastering practical workarounds, managing exceptions and localized efficiencies, and situational problem-solving. This knowledge never makes it into an official manual, yet real-life experience and multiple academic studies say that up to 85% of company knowledge is tacit.
VP for Automation, EMEA at Zebra Technologies.
Because this knowledge relies on muscle memory, experience, ad hoc conversations during lunch and notes, traditional top-down standard operating procedures (SOPs) inherently fail to capture it. Tacit knowledge enables employee competence, autonomy and job satisfaction, but can be unevenly distributed or lead to gatekeeping to the detriment of others. And when experienced or long-serving employees retire or move to a new company, that tacit knowledge is lost.
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