Anecdote of tacit knowledge – A story of a Shepherd & Brilliant Minds….

There is an interesting anecdote of a contradiction faced by the most brilliant engineers engaged in laying cables through a long pipe at a Greenfield site. The pipe was too long for them to put the cable from one end and take it out from the other. They were doing brainstorming and finding out technogical solutions to get this job done, but no solution was seem to be getting into sight.

A shepherd supervising his grazing animals was silently observing them came up & said whether he can be of any help. All those brilliant minds laughed at him. Saddened by their gestures he disappeared the next moment and came back after a while with a caged mouse in one hand and some “bhajias” in the other. He tied the cable to the mouse’s tail and kept the bhajias at the other end and pushed the mouse from one end. Mouse ran from one end chasing the smell of the “Bhajias”.

Mouse got the bhajias and engineers got ingenious solution to their problem. All those brilliant minds were dumb folded with the ingenuity of the poor, illiterate shepherd.

Few Questions to ponder……

Do we value tacit knowledge and how do we explore & capture it?

Are we mentally ready to listen to a shepherd for solving our problem?

And Take away ….

Everyone need to be invited and is important for innovation, because most of the times ingenious solutions lie outside your domain.