Overview
Deep Smarts: How to Cultivate and Transfer Enduring Business Wisdom describes expertise as more than information. Deep smarts are the practical wisdom, intuition, pattern recognition, and judgment accumulated through varied experience.
Leonard and Swap explain why this knowledge is both valuable and difficult to move. Experts often act without consciously spelling out every cue they noticed. Successors therefore need more than access to instructions: they need examples, guided practice, stories, and opportunities to understand how an expert interprets a situation.
Why it matters for handovers
A useful handover makes room for the details behind an answer: warning signs, exceptions, trade-offs, failed approaches, and the people whose perspective should be sought.
This is the territory of tacit knowledge and expert judgment. Flamekeeper's guided questions aim to make more of that reasoning explicit, while recognizing that some knowledge is best transferred through shadowing, walkthroughs, or action items rather than prose alone.