Experts teach the description

Most people trying to learn from an expert ask a few questions and think they've got it. The expert, for their part, teaches what they can access — and what they can access is a vague surface description of their skill, not the skill. This isn't laziness or bad teaching. Mature expert knowledge is tacit; it is not articulable, by anyone, on request. So the expert teaches the description sincerely, believing it's the skill.

Then few or no students get it. The expert sees the failure and draws the only conclusion that fits the evidence as they see it: the students must not be up to it. The students, meanwhile, did their best with the instruction they were given. Nobody on either side has the frame to see what actually happened, because seeing it requires understanding how expertise works — and in twenty years around sports coaching I have not met anyone who holds that understanding, and I doubt it's common in executive coaching either.

That's the trap: the need for structured extraction is invisible from both sides at once. The expert can't see it because their description feels complete from the inside. The student can't see it because they have no access to what the expert isn't saying. Demand never forms for a thing neither party knows is missing.

I hold this as a working claim from practice, not a finding. What would test it: whether coach-education curricula contain any serious treatment of tacit knowledge, and whether a single expert's failed students converge on the same gap — whether you can reconstruct what the expert never said from the shape of what the students never learned.