Search for tacit knowledge

We had a process called virtual BCA inspection — cameras and webcams recording inspections that would normally be conducted on-site. BCA published best practice guidelines. I read them carefully, synthesised the requirements, and concluded that our existing camera specs were insufficient. We needed higher quality equipment to meet the written standards.

When we invited an experienced vendor over, he told us that nobody actually uses those specs. The file sizes crash the authority’s computers. Everyone uses lower resolution cameras, and it works. This insight is not written down anywhere. It lives in the people who have done it fifty times.

This pattern repeats across the real world. Regulatory inspectors don’t check all building control requirements on-site — or at least not in the most technically correct way. You can sell residential rooms in a commercially zoned building if the planning department approves the use. The permitted uses of shophouses in Singapore can technically be anything if you make a sensible case. Design-and-build companies perform post-TOP construction that violates building control requirements for landed properties and gets away with it because those properties tend to sit in less visible parts of the area.

What is written — explicit knowledge — is not set in stone. It can be negotiated, violated, trivialised, or simply meant differently by those who enforce it. The grey areas are where real knowledge resides. I call this tacit knowledge. It is observed and practised firsthand, then passed to people with whom the practitioner has an economic relationship.

This transforms the way I acquire knowledge. Rather than dedicating myself solely to textbooks and public circulars, I need to initiate relationships with practitioners who have done what I want to do, or in domain close thereof.

Morever, I also need to invest my time in getting my hands dirty. Analysing sites on the ground, talking to tenants, and partnering with a veteran entrepreneurs yields more than reading another property article, podcast transcript, or McKinsey and CBRE report. The work is the research.