I was inspired by an excellent article by Robert Bogue on the Tech Republic community site, entitled "Convert Tacit Knowledge into Explicit Knowledge to Ensure Better Application Development"

As knowledge and methods emerge from new technology and circumstances, a lot of know-how is uncovered and assimilated by workers in an intuitive and observational manner through direct experience. In the beginning, there are few written guides and rules that can be referenced to produce the same results that the experienced individuals can produce. From a business perspective, one of the key to cost savings is to find a way to quickly translate the emerging intuitive knowledge from experienced workers to less experienced workers. This is important to producing significant cost savings on large projects.

However translating that intuitive knowledge into new rules is not a necessarily a skill shared by the workers with the most experience. Very often your most experienced Subject Matter Expert has the least ability to map that knowledge into useable rules by others. As a project manager this can be a problem. 

My answer? Decouple the skills: the intuitive knowledge source still resides with the experienced Subject Matter Expert, but the task of eliciting that information and translating it into re-usable rules I give to someone with high-verbal, written, and social interviewing skills.

As Project Manager, that person with the high interviewing skills will often be you.