---
type: "synthesis"
sources: ["agentic"]
tags: ["tacit-knowledge", "epistemology", "knowledge-management"]
id: "cross-polanyi-thread"
sourceVaultSlug: "hbr-seg-agentic"
originDay: 6
articleStem: "hbr-seg-agentic"
sourceUrl: "(unified vault: 9 sources)"
sourceTitle: "HBR — Firm Ⅱ-A · Agentic operating model / brand code / workstreams"
---
A single 60-year-old idea — Michael Polanyi's *tacit knowledge* ("we know more than we can tell") — silently structures a third of the corpus.

A087 makes it an explicit axis: [[concept-knowledge-type-tacit-vs-explicit]] is the horizontal dimension of the [[framework-gen-ai-deployment]] (see [[prereq-tacit-vs-explicit-knowledge-d6]]), sorting tasks into the [[concept-no-regrets-zone]]/[[concept-quality-control-zone]] (explicit) versus [[concept-creative-catalyst-zone]]/[[concept-human-first-zone]] (tacit).

A026 builds its entire thesis on it: the [[concept-implicit-organization]] vs. the [[concept-documented-organization]] ([[quote-implicit-vs-documented]]) is Polanyi/Nonaka applied to org design; [[concept-professional-discretion]] is tacit judgment operationalized, and [[concept-retrievable-layer]] separates codified data from contextual application.

A027 treats tacit knowledge as the bottleneck itself: [[claim-bottleneck-is-explicit-judgment]] and [[claim-agents-cannot-infer-context]] ([[quote-agents-operate-on-explicit]] — agents "operate based on what is made explicit; nothing more").

**The productive disagreement:** A087 and A026 treat much tacit knowledge as *genuinely resistant* to codification (hence human-first zones and permanent oversight); A027 is more optimistic that debate and scenarios ([[framework-scenario-based-extraction]]) can *externalize* far more of it than assumed. The enrichment counter [[cp-agents-learn-norms-from-data]] adds that agents can absorb *some* norms via data/RLHF. The corpus thus spans a spectrum — from "codify aggressively" (A027) to "some things never codify" (A026/A087) — that drives both [[cross-codification-imperative]] and [[cross-executor-to-judge]].