Tribal Knowledge

The very early Romans divided themselves into three quasi-ethnic subgroups. These groups were the Ramnes, the Tities, and the Luceres. Each was loosely associated with its own geographic area, with the Ramnes traditionally thought of as the original inhabitants of Rome.

The Romans called one of these subgroups a tribus, and that’s where we get the modern word tribe. These tribes were all active in Rome’s religious practices, and they contributed soldiers to the military. Gradually, they became a part of the government, with more and more tribes forming as Rome’s population grew.

These tribes eventually grew to 35 in number, and these became the somewhat organic zones for governance. They weren’t like modern districts in the sense that the tribes weren’t run like local municipalities, but instead the tribes were viewed as competent and important administrators, executing the Republic’s will on tax collection and gathering census data.

Tribus makes its way to English in a lot of notable ways. Tribunals are specialized types of courts, while a tribute is like a tip of the hat to something you appreciate.

Tribute opens the door to a slew of derived words that you might not instantly recognize as having anything to do with tribes. Distribute, contribute, and attribute are also tributes to the word tribus. Those three words represent an etymological rabbit hole best to go down another day.

And, of course, there’s tribal. This most direct descendant of tribus is rather unremarkable on its own, but there’s a phrase that has cropped up during the early 21st century worth an eyebrow raise.

This phrase is tribal knowledge.

It’s really catchy, right? If you work in an office, I can bet you’ve heard this phrase thrown around recently. As far as English phrases go, it’s also pretty intuitive, isn’t it?

In a nutshell, when people refer to this sort of knowledge in an organization, they mean all the stuff that’s not written down anywhere—yet this stuff is incredibly important to the way the organization works. This can manifest in a few different ways.

One way is with a hidden code of morals that runs underneath the surface, so only time and experience really gives you the ability to crack the code. This is a bit of gatekeeping, and it can easily dovetail with another trick: jargon use. Together, this sort of tribal knowledge can act as an immune system, so nobody new can join (unless they figure out this code).

A less insidious form of tribal knowledge is when the employees know how to use a machine or system, but it’s not written down anywhere. When you think of a tribe teaching its children how to behave, this is the method that comes to mind.

For a small business owner, tribal knowledge is both enemy and ally. You need to document how things work if you ever want to grow as a business, but unless you’ve been around for a few decades, you’re probably still in the process of figuring out how to do things. You’re still working on writing things down and making them your official way to do things at your business, so you rely on this sort of hidden knowledge to get things done.

Creating an operations manual and documenting all of these processes is the obvious remedy, but this can take a long time, and few of us are really good at it. In the meantime, we all have to rely on this sort of hand-me-down knowledge in order to function.

Tribal knowledge isn’t all bad—in fact, some of it is necessary. It’s just that, as your business matures, you tend to hope for less of it over time. You’d like for someone else to be able to run things once you’re gone, and if everyone you’ve trained calls in sick one day, it would be great to have the process written down.

If you own a business, writing down your process is probably one of the best ways to spend any extra time. It’s tedious and your employees will probably hate you for a while, but once you get everything recorded, you’ve got something that someone else can use. The knowledge is no longer tribal.

Do you hear this term in your daily life, or is tribal knowledge pretty new to you?