2/17

We only briefly touched this topic in class, but it also has to relate to a discussion I had recently with an engineering friend of mine. The topic is the short-term focus of results or outcomes either in a business or in a personal setting. In class, the point was brought up that projects need to demonstrate the ability to produce value and recoup the initial outlays very quickly. I think this has become a very big problem in our society. Before computers, people had to do that math or statistic by hand. This meant that when a supervisor wanted a statistic or an analysis of some kind, the turnaround might be three or four days. With modern computing power, many of those tasks involving calculations would take mere minutes, basically the time it takes to enter the data into the computer. An engineer uses calculations on a daily basis, but the main part of his job is to come up with solutions that go beyond the calculations themselves. His supervisors complain because they expect things immediately because that’s what they are used to. I think that our society has come to expect things in unreasonably short time periods, both at the job and at home. I thnk I talked about this before in my previous blog, but I thought I would relate this point as well.

Another part of this conversation was interesting because it basically describes the difference between explicit and tacit knowledge. The explicit knowledge was easily analyzed just by plugging it into the computer and figuring out the formula for the desired metric or statistic. However, the problems involving tacit knowledge are not easily or at least quickly solved. This takes time and the person trying to solve that issue would not be able to codify why or how they do so.

Finally, I don’t necessarily think that the two forms of knowledge are exclusive of each other. In other words, I think that some knowledge that is tacit can be turned into explicit with the proper complex analysis and understanding. However, I also think that the human brain is much more complex than we give it credit for. This means that, even though I think it may be possible one day to turn knowledge from tacit into explicit, we are far from understanding how the brain works and why people behave the way they do.