---
id: "contrarian-experts-cannot-document"
type: "contrarian-insight"
source_timestamps: ["§ Where to Start"]
tags: ["knowledge-management", "documentation", "contrarian"]
related: ["concept-codifying-judgment", "framework-scenario-based-extraction"]
challenges: "The conventional view that standard operating procedures (SOPs) and direct documentation requests are effective ways to capture institutional knowledge."
sources: ["agentic"]
sourceVaultSlug: "hbr-seg-agentic"
originDay: 6
articleStem: "hbr-new-27-teach-ai-your-decisions"
sourceUrl: "https://hbr.org/2026/06/teach-your-ai-how-you-make-decisions"
sourceTitle: "Teach Your AI How You Make Decisions"
---
# Do Not Ask Experts to Document Their Judgment

**Contrarian insight (the source's own):** Conventional knowledge management assumes that to capture expertise, you should ask your best people to write down what they know — SOPs, wikis, playbooks. The authors argue this rarely works because experts are notoriously poor at articulating tacit knowledge in the abstract. They know far more than they can say.

Instead, organizations must use debate and scenario walkthroughs to externalize reasoning (see [[quote-debate-externalizes-reasoning]]). The tactical replacement is [[framework-scenario-based-extraction|scenario-based judgment extraction]]: convene a small panel, add a moderator, walk through realistic edge cases, and capture where the panel disagrees. This feeds [[concept-codifying-judgment|codifying judgment]].

**Challenges:** the belief that SOPs and direct documentation requests are effective ways to capture institutional knowledge.

**Enrichment / counterweight:** This stance is consistent with tacit-knowledge theory (Nonaka & Takeuchi) and cognitive task analysis. However, regulated industries (finance, healthcare, aviation) still rely on documented procedures and checklists for compliance, and knowledge-management practitioners argue panels should *feed back into* structured documentation rather than replace it — over-reliance on raw transcripts can produce unwieldy, hard-to-maintain context files. See [[cp-sops-still-valuable]] and the open question [[question-maintaining-codified-judgment]].