What technical skill transfer cannot carry over

When we say technical skill transfer, what usually gets carried over is procedure. The order of the steps, how to use the tools, the numeric thresholds. But wedged into the gaps between those procedures is a single link that cannot be carried over, no matter what. Without carrying that link, we convince ourselves that we have "inherited" the skill.

I noticed it when I was the one doing the handover. I had handed over every procedure. I had them read the manual. And yet the other person could not grasp the whole. So I begin to say the same flow over again, in different words. "Ah, that means this—" "That was from a different case—" and as I rephrase, story after story that I never wrote into any manual comes out of my own mouth. What was supposed to be a handover has, at some point, turned into a teaching session.

And then I notice something stranger. I know this scene from the other side too. Back when I was the one being handed to, I moved my hands exactly as told, and still could not see the whole. Every time I asked the predecessor back, an answer came that was nowhere in the materials. What that predecessor was fumbling to add back then, and what I am now adding as I rephrase, are the same thing. On the giving side or the receiving side, we stand stuck before the same link.

This thing that only shows itself in the middle of rephrasing—that is the missing link of inheritance. But its direction is the reverse of the missing link in biology. There, some spot in the chain of fossils is "not yet found"—a link that is absent. But the missing link of inheritance is not absent at all. It has always been there, inside the person giving. It is used every day. There was simply no method to connect it to the chain. Because the person does not even think "I am judging," it never becomes words, never gets written into the manual, and stays behind in its original place, never handed over.

That link can be named. It is judgment. Where you felt something was off, what you discarded, why you decided in that order. A manual can write down "what to do." But "why do it that way," "why choose it now," keeps working inside the person, unwritten. What cannot be inherited is not knowledge. It is judgment.

Why is it that only judgment won't connect? Procedure has already become words. Because it is words, it can be written out. Because it can be written out, it can be joined to the chain. Judgment is different. It works in a state before it becomes words, and inside the person it is over in an instant. So even when you try to connect it, there is no handle to grip. When you think you have "inherited," what actually crosses over is only the chain of procedure. The link of judgment always stays inside the original person.

If that is so, what is needed is not a record. It is connecting. The missing link is not something you go looking for and find—because it is already there. The problem is how to take out the judgment that works without ever becoming words, and reconnect it into a form that moves once more inside another person: transplanting. On how to make that connection, I will write one link at a time, from here on. How far can something believed un-inheritable actually be carried over. It starts, first, with noticing that there is a link there at all.