The Wrist Angle Problem: What Sports Taught Me About Organizational Knowledge

In my earlier life I was a decent table tennis player. Once you reach a certain level in that sport, you stop thinking about your strokes during a match. The wrist angle, the elbow position, the contact point, all of that disappears. Practicing these movements matters in training, when you're working on individual elements. But what works in training doesn't work in the game. In the game you think about patterns and tactics. About how your opponent is building his game.

We know more than we can say. The scientist Michael Polanyi called that tacit knowledge. The stroke is still there, subsidiary, as he would put it. In the game you rely on your abilities without attending to them. Every athlete knows this, the moment you consciously focus on the stroke mid-action, the game falls apart.

Reading Polanyi right now, because theory genuinely interests me, and comparing it with my sport, I realize what bothers me about most organizational development approaches. And that includes culture development and organizational learning too.

The wrong obsession

Most OD approaches are obsessed with people. Leadership competencies. Behavioral change. Individual performance. The logic is always the same: develop people, fix the organization.

That's exactly like staring at the wrist angle and calling it strategy.

Where knowledge actually lives

Organizations are not the sum of their individuals. They emerge between people, in shared practices, in how meaning is created, in what goes without saying and what is never said at all. That's where the actual organizational knowledge sits. And it's tacit. Any attempt to extract it destroys exactly what makes organizations capable.

Best practices, lessons learned, knowledge management, all attempts to press something living into a dead form. What survives the extraction is no longer knowledge. It’s a record.

A different kind of intervention

The question is whether a different kind of intervention exists. One that doesn't extract knowledge but creates the conditions for existing tacit knowledge to generate new knowledge. For better judgment, understanding, and conclusions.

Divergent interpretations in organizations are not a problem. They are raw material. And that raw material is systematically made invisible, explained away, or eliminated through artificial alignment.

When organizations build an infrastructure that makes these differences visible, not to resolve them, not to align them, but simply to show them, understanding emerges through friction. No training can produce that.

That's the infrastructure we built with qohubs. No tool that changes people.

A structure that changes what's possible between them, because it makes visible what is said, but also what is never spoken.

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qohubs the collective sensemaking platform for organizations. qohubs enables small groups to think together, without a facilitator, without outsourcing their own judgment. Try it with your team now.