Tacit knowledge

Tacit knowledge is expertise a person applies without being able to fully explain it: judgement, pattern recognition, and instinct built from experience rather than instruction.

Explicit knowledge is written down and transferable by reading. Tacit knowledge is the engineer who senses which service is at fault before the dashboard says so, or the account manager who knows which client needs a call rather than an email. It transfers through working alongside someone, not through documentation.

You cannot extract tacit knowledge with a questionnaire, but you can capture its output. The decisions a person made, the options they rejected, and the reasons they gave are explicit artefacts of tacit judgement, and they are usually already sitting in tickets, threads, and review comments.

That is why capture works better as a by-product of work than as a separate exercise. The record of why a call was made is worth more later than a generic description of how the role is performed.