Tacit is just un-instrumented

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Anand S

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Jul 14, 2026, 6:00:55 AM (7 days ago) Jul 14

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At The Curzon Hotel, my key card didn't work. But every time I went to the reception, they'd send a bellboy who would use the same key card, jiggle it a bit, pull it in and out a few times, and the door would open.

Every night. For five nights. I just couldn't get the knack of it.

I've been at the other end of this. People often reach out to me saying, "Anand, this software isn't working." Then I go do the same thing they did, and it works. (Sometimes, I just need to watch them do it and it works.)

It's an intangible skill, I guess.

That gave me some food for thought. This is exactly the kind of skill an AI cannot pick up, right? I mean, jiggling keys, physical world, tacit knowledge, precisely the kind of things that would be AI proof.

So I asked Claude Fable for its opinion. "Can AI pick up the key knack?"

"It already has." Claude said. Apparently, opening locks is one of the most studied problems in robotics.

The only reason opening the key feels hard to learn is because we didn't / couldn't put it in words. But a sensor on his hand would. Tacit is just un-instrumented. Once we measure it, it becomes training data.

As long as something is cheap to try and fast + clear to verify, it doesn't matter how "physical" it is - we can build a model around it.

	Cheap to try	Expensive to try
Fast + clear to verify	Pottery	Surgery
Slow + vague to verify	Friendships	Mergers

That's worth asking at a firm level, too.

Try #PROMPT #TODO

Let's take different roles in an organization - e.g. CMO, CIO, CFO, CHRO, ... as well as CEO/COO of different businesses: insurance, asset management, waste management, logistics, healthcare equipment, card processor, scientific paper publisher, virtual school platform, physical schools, ...

For these (or feel free to replace any of these with the most striking examples), what skills would be exemplars in each of the four quadrants? The aim is to help leaders understand which of their skills are: