About: Tribal knowledge

Tribal knowledge is knowledge that is known within an in-group of people but unknown outside of it. A tribe, in this sense, is a group of people that share such a common knowledge. In the context of corporations, tribal knowledge or know-how has been described most broadly as the collective wisdom of the organization and the sum of all the knowledge and capabilities of all the people; however, in management science, it is usually viewed as a particular subset thereof: a type of institutional memory that lacks adequate documentation, such that its preservation in the organization over time relies solely on processes such as mentoring, apprenticeship, on-the-job training, and, at the heart of all of those, continuity of staffing, which is inherently vulnerable to employee turnover (of both w