I stumbled across the term ‘tacit knowledge’ this week and I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it since.

Tacit knowledge. Defined by philosopher Michael Polanyi in eight words; “We can know more than we can tell.”

I read that and something in my chest just… settled. Like a word I’d been reaching for my entire career had finally shown up, eleven years late, completely unbothered.

I’ve never been great at explaining what I actually do.

Not the technical version, that part’s easy enough. Brand strategy. Visual identity. Eleven years of digital marketing and funnel thinking baked into every design decision. Fine.

But the other part. The part that makes clients cry on kick-off calls. The part that makes them say “I’ve never felt so seen in my life” before I’ve even opened Illustrator. That part I’ve never had clean language for.

I’d try to explain it and it would come out vague and a little bit woo woo arrogant and honestly kind of embarrassing for someone who prides herself on clarity. Something about instinct. Something about pattern recognition. Something about just… knowing.

Turns out there was a name for it this whole time.

Tacit knowledge is the gap between the knowing and the doing.

It’s the thing so second nature to you that you’ve stopped seeing it entirely. The expertise so deeply embedded in your muscle memory that you can’t reverse-engineer it into steps, can’t write it in a brief, can’t explain it to a designer who asks the wrong questions.

You just know. You’ve always known. You’ve just never been able to tell.

And here’s what I’ve come to understand about founders specifically:
your brand is absolutely soaked in yours.

The real version of you, the magnetic one, the version that makes the right clients feel like they’ve found the only person who could possibly do this work, that version lives almost entirely in your tacit knowledge. The things you do automatically. The values and skills so fundamental to the way you exist that you forgot they were values or skills. The way you move through the world that feels so obvious to you it would never occur to you to put it in a brief (or in your work).

Which is why every time you try to write your own bio it comes out wrong. Why the designer you hired produced something technically competent and completely soulless. Why you’ve been trying to explain what makes you different for years and it keeps landing flat.

That’s not a you problem. That’s a tacit knowledge problem.

My Brand Expansion framework exists specifically to excavate it.

Not with generic ‘what are your values’ questions. Not with mood boards and Pinterest boards and ‘describe your brand in three words.’ With the kind of questions that make you pause mid-sentence, stare slightly into the middle distance, and go, oh. THAT’S what I actually mean.

The questions that pull the real answer out from underneath the one that sounds good in a bio.

I had a client recently who wrote a 500 word passage in her onboarding homework when asked to describe her brand as a real person going about their day. It was beautiful, honestly. Luxe. Elegant. Considered. Every word deliberate. She was describing a high-end, premium brand with total confidence and I was nodding along and then I hit this one moment, buried in the middle of the passage, almost an afterthought.

She mentioned how this personified brand asks her taxi driver about his childhood and they chat the whole ride to the airport. Smiling at the older couple holding hands in the first class lounge.

She didn’t flag it. She wasn’t performing warmth for me, she wasn’t making a point about her values or her brand personality. She just… wrote it down, almost as a throwaway detail, and moved on.

I couldn’t move on.

I sat with that detail for a long time. Because that one unrehearsable moment, the taxi driver, the older couple, the completely unself-conscious warmth of it, told me more about her brand than the other 480 words combined.

A luxe brand without that human warmth feels cold. Feels like a hotel lobby with no one in it, all marble and no soul. That tiny detail she almost didn’t write down became the axis of her entire brand identity. The thing that made everything else make sense. The thing that made it feel alive.

She knew it. She’d always known it. She just hadn’t been able to tell it.

That’s tacit knowledge doing exactly what it does.

And then there’s the other thing my brain does.

I’m AuDHD. And for a long time I thought of that as just a fact about me, something that explained why I work the way I work, why I need what I need, why certain environments make me want to peel off my own skin. I didn’t really think of it as a professional edge until relatively recently.

But my AuDHD brain notices things in our conversations that you don’t even realise you’ve said.

The micro-expressions. The slight hesitation before you answer a particular question. The word you’ve used four times across your questionnaire answers without realising you’ve used it, circling the same idea from four different angles like you’re trying to say something you haven’t quite landed yet. The off-hand comment you throw in as a joke that is actually the most honest thing you’ve said in the whole conversation.

It processes patterns other people genuinely cannot see. It’s not a skill I developed or a technique I learned. It’s just how my brain works.

And when you combine that with a framework specifically designed to draw out what people can’t consciously articulate, something interesting happens. The gap between the knowing and the telling starts to close.

I’ve been doing this for eleven years and I’ve never been able to explain the mechanism of it in a way that felt true. Or, to be frank, something tangible enough to market as a USP for people to want to pay for.

‘I ask good questions’ didn’t cut it. ‘I have a strong instinct for brand’ felt like something anyone could claim. ‘I just get people’ is meaningless.

But this, the excavation of tacit knowledge through a framework that goes to the foundations AND a brain that’s wired to catch what falls through the cracks, that’s actually what’s happening. That’s the thing I’ve been doing without having language for it.

Polanyi said we can know more than we can tell.

I think about the founders I’ve worked with who spent years succeeding despite their brand rather than because of it. Who knew, on some level, that something was off. Who had the knowing but couldn’t access the telling.

That gap is where I live and work.

Turns out it has a name.

I’m still a little bit delighted about that.

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For brand design built from your tacit knowledge, click here →

This post was originally shared on my Substack, Brand & Being. Subscribe here →

_{BTW, I discovered this concept [via this reel] from Manifest Like Mom on Instagram. Her content is unbelievably good.}