The above story was deemed to lack the necessary criteria for tacitness. The interviewee indicated that the knowledge he referred to is generally known by leaders. It even may represent an official procedure. Therefore, we have no evidence that this knowledge is attributable to the officer's experience in dealing with sensitive items that are missing. On the other hand, consider a story from another officer about a similar issue.

It is important for a commander to know when to report bad news to the boss and when to withhold it. My unit had just completed a night move and had been in position for about two hours. A weapon was identified as missing around midnight. The section chief told me that the weapon was in the current position because he had seen it during the sensitive item checks. I talked to each member of the section and determined that the weapon was in the position. We looked for the weapon from about midnight until 0300 hours. During this time I chose not to notify the battalion commander because I was confident that the weapon would be found. However, a sensitive item report was due at 0400 hours, so, for ethical reasons, I notified the battalion commander at 0300 hours that the weapon was missing. I told the battalion commander what I had done so far and that I was confident that the weapon would be found at first light. He was not upset. We found the weapon within ten minutes after the sun came up and the battalion commander was pleased we followed the standard operating procedures for dealing with a missing weapon.

In this story, the officer clearly expresses some knowledge he has acquired through previous experience in dealing with missing sensitive items (e.g., weapons). He has learned that, under some circumstances, it is best to hold off reporting a problem until it becomes necessary, so long as appropriate steps are taken to resolve the problem in the interim.

Coding the interview summaries. After determining which examples of knowledge meet the established criteria, it is useful to transform the summaries into a more usable form for the purpose of later analyses. We have used a format that is based on the procedural feature of our definition of tacit knowledge. That is, the knowledge is expressed as a mapping between a set of antecedent conditions and a set of consequent actions.

An item of knowledge is represented by one or more antecedent condition or "IF" statements, by one or more consequent action or "THEN" statements, and by a brief explanation or "BECAUSE" statement. The logical operators "AND" and "OR" are used in the coding to signal relationships of conjunction and disjunction, respectively. The operator "ELSE" is employed in the coding to connect sets of condition-action mappings into more complex procedures. Each individual piece of tacit knowledge is rewritten into this procedural form. This coding allows the researcher to analyze more readily the content of the tacit knowledge for the purpose of identifying categories of knowledge and selecting examples of knowledge that may be useful as items in a tacit-knowledge inventory. The result of this phase is a set of coded tacit-knowledge items.

The coded tacit-knowledge items then may be subjected to a sorting process to identify major categories of tacit knowledge. This sorting may entail asking a group of experts to organize the items according to categories of their own devising. The results of the independent sortings may be analyzed using hierarchical or other cluster analyses, a family of techniques for uncovering the natural groupings in a set of data (for more details regarding this technique, see Hartigan, 1975). This type of analysis may produce hierarchically organized clusters of items that can be expressed in the form of a tree. The clusters can be interpreted by experts and assigned labels that represent different categories of tacit knowledge. The categories may provide an indication of the major areas of learning that occur in one's respective field. The category framework is also useful in selecting items for test development that provide a broad representation of the performance domain.