Mining tacit knowledge: Why expert know-how never reaches company communications

You have almost certainly sat in a meeting where someone on the team says out loud a brilliant insight into a client's problem. Someone else immediately adds that this should absolutely become a blog post or a LinkedIn opening. Everyone nods, energised.

Then the meeting ends, and exactly nothing happens.

I learned this phenomenon the hard way. When I was Head of Client Relations at Proxion, I was also responsible for group-wide communications. We spotted the problem quickly. The house was full of top specialists whose heads held a huge amount of communications value. It never made it into the public.

We decided to solve it with new processes, and we did exactly what companies usually do. We opened a separate idea inbox in email. We added a mandatory communications field to the ready-made project meeting templates. We even ran communications training for project managers. From group administration we shouted that we would provide the support and the service, if only people would throw those ideas our way.

01And how did that go?

The idea inbox yawned empty. The communications field in meeting notes was most often ticked off with a dash. Despite the training, expert communications never became a real routine. Even collecting ideas never got off the ground.

We failed because we tried to force specialists into new bureaucracy instead of bringing communications into the work they were already doing. The same gap appears when strategy stays in the drawer: the guidance exists, but the work happens somewhere else.

02Why does expert knowledge stay in the dark?

The problem is not that specialists would not want to share what they know. The problem is how high the threshold is, and how heavy the process feels. We usually see three clear bottlenecks that goodwill, or support from the communications team, cannot fix on its own.

The first is blank-page fear. A specialist knows their field in depth, but they are not necessarily a professional writer. When the task is to produce a finished article from nothing, the threshold for starting simply grows too high.

The second challenge is time. In expert organisations, billable client work or urgent projects always beat communications tasks. Few people can spare three hours polishing a text.

The third, and perhaps most frustrating, bottleneck is the communications process itself. When a specialist finally gets a draft written, the email rally begins. The communications team comments on brand voice, leadership checks the line, and colleagues add their own notes on the substance. Soon the original draft has gone back and forth as an email attachment ten times. In the end nobody knows which version is the last one. After that experience, the specialist will certainly not volunteer to write a second time.

Made with AI

Blank-page fear, time pressure and email ping-pong make expert communications heavy, even when the will is there.

03How do you bring tacit knowledge into the communications workflow?

The organisation's job is not to train every specialist into a communications professional, or to force them to fill in new forms. We need to build a system that lowers the threshold and moves specialists' insights straight into the communications workflow.

Here are three practical steps that actually make the process work.

1. Capture ideas where they are born

A separate idea inbox in email does not work, because it asks someone to leave their actual work. Ideas, decisions and drafts now appear in Slack, Teams and meetings. The communications team has to be able to catch them directly from everyday tools. When there is a shared communications workflow, a specialist can throw a half-formed thought from Slack, for example, straight into the team's shared view, without a separate word processor. The same principle shows up in how communications needs are spotted in meetings and Slack.

2. Use AI in the unpacking stage

Used well, generative AI is an excellent assistant for unpacking raw material. A specialist can dictate their idea, or a meeting can use an AI agent that surfaces the most important communications proposals and observations automatically. AI does not replace the specialist's judgement. It only drafts a first version from the raw material, in the organisation's shared brand and tone of voice.

3. Focus on approval, not file ping-pong

Once the communications team has turned the specialist's idea into a draft, the review round has to be seamless. Instead of email, the specialist gets a protected review link. They see the text, can leave comments in the right place and approve the content. The communications team can see at all times who is doing what and where the process stands. An audit trail keeps the specialist's corrections and the editorial judgement neatly on record. Approval belongs in the workflow, not in the email thread that follows it.

Made with AI

A half-formed thought is caught from everyday tools into a shared view, where it can be refined and approved.

04Communications director: lead the whole

When the communications workflow is in order, a communications director's time is no longer spent chasing emails and Word files, or refreshing empty idea inboxes. Time is freed for actual expert work and for leading the whole. That is why the CCO AI playbook does not start with prompting, but with getting the work into one view.

Lyyli is built for exactly this need. It is not a text generator. It is a communications management system where planning, brand management and specialist involvement meet in the same workflow. Strategy and brand guidelines shape the content during the work. They do not remain separate documents on the intranet.

Lyyli does not make communications perfect. It makes communications possible.

05Do a free communications analysis

Does your specialists' expertise actually show on the outside? Our free communications analysis goes through your organisation's public web content and surfaces observations on, for example, message pillars, brand voice and consistency of content.