“Kairos is the time of tactical appropriateness, of shifting priorities and objects of attention from one qualitativel differing moment to the next. This is time as humanly experienced; ”in the fulness of time,” the emergent ”not quite yet,” the ”now” that once arrived feels right. It is a brief strip of right time, marked at its beginning and end by turning points. It is not simply a particular duration in clock time. Yet every kairos strip of time has a location in kronos time.”
(This passage is from the opening chapter of Frederick Erickson’s “Talk and Social Theory, “page 6)
“The mètis is that form of practical intelligence, using conjectural and obliqueknowledge, which anticipates, modifies and influences the fate of events in adversity and ambiguity. When abstract generalizations (episteme) are unable to handle a changeable and unpredictable situation ; when know-how (techne) does not have any grip on a chancy and fluid reality; when practical wisdom, drawn from social practice (phronesis) does not come with any solution to a mutable and unsure event; here comes the fourth dimension of knowledge, that no treaty could teach, that no words can fully contain, a knowledge of short-cuts, of sagacious envisioning, of perspicuous intervention, even more mutable that the situation it has to cope with, discreet, operative, conjectural: the Mètis.”
(And this one is from Philippe Baumard’s “Oblique Knowledge: The Clandestine Work of Organizations”)