Your junior staff are learning how to do the job.
But they’re not learning how to think like experts.
And it’s not their fault. It’s a neurological gap we’ve accidentally created.
Dr Fiona Kerr calls it the “osmosis gap” — and it explains why hybrid and remote work might be creating a hidden development crisis in your organisation.
Here’s what’s happening:
Expert knowledge comes in two forms. Explicit knowledge can be written down, trained, and transferred through documents and courses. Tacit knowledge is different. It’s the pattern recognition, intuition, and judgment that experts can’t easily articulate. The “I just know” of mastery.
Tacit knowledge transfers through proximity.
It happens when junior staff overhear how a senior leader handles a difficult call. When they watch someone navigate ambiguity. When they absorb the micro-decisions that never make it into any training manual.
Think about how you actually became good at your job. Not the courses you took. The patterns you absorbed from watching people who were better than you.
Neurologically, this requires something remarkable: brain-to-brain coupling. When humans interact face-to-face, our neural patterns literally synchronise. Eye contact releases oxytocin. Voice creates theta and gamma wave coupling. We exchange thousands of chemical signals through what Fiona calls the “chemosphere.”
Video calls don’t create this coupling.
The technology is brilliant for explicit knowledge transfer. Terrible for tacit knowledge absorption.
So what’s happening in hybrid organisations? The “sticky problems” — the complex, ambiguous challenges that require tacit knowledge to navigate — all landed on experienced middle managers. They burned out. They left. And junior staff never saw those problems being solved. They never chunked the patterns. They never developed the intuition.
Five years from now, organisations might discover they have a whole generation of employees who can execute procedures but can’t exercise judgment.
The osmosis gap isn’t about effort or intelligence. It’s about proximity and how brains actually transfer expertise.
What’s your organisation doing to ensure tacit knowledge still transfers?
Full conversation with Dr Fiona Kerr on The NeuroCollective podcast.
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