The Knowledge-Creating Company

terms like “metaphor,” “analogy,” and “model” are ideal types. In reality, they are often hard to distinguish from one another; the same phrase or image can embody more than one of the three functions. Still, the three terms capture the process by which organizations convert tacit knowledge into explicit knowledge: first, by linking contradictory things and ideas through metaphor; then, by resolving these contradictions through analogy; and, finally, by crystallizing the created concepts and embodying them in a model, which makes the knowledge available to the rest of the company.