The following three major approaches to knowledge acquisition from individuals and groups are applicable to the capture of tacit knowledge. In many cases, the approaches can be combined [10]:

 Interviewing experts – structured interviews of subject matter experts is the most often used technique to render key tacit knowledge of an individual into more explicit forms. In many organizations, structured interviewing is performed through exit interviews that are held when knowledgeable staff are near retirement age.

 Learning by being told – the interviewee expresses and refines his or her knowledge and at the same time, the interviewer or knowledge engineer clarifies and validates the knowledge thus rendering the knowledge in an explicit form. This form of knowledge acquisition typically involves domain and task analysis, process tracing, and protocol analysis and simulations. Simulations are especially effective for later stages of knowledge acquisition, validating, refining, and completing the knowledge capture process.

 Learning by Observation – Observation is an important tool that can provide a wealth of information. Silent observation is best used to capture the spontaneous nature of a particular process or procedure.

A number of other techniques may be used to capture tacit knowledge from individuals and from groups, including [10, 11]:

 Storytelling – Stories are another excellent vehicle for both capturing and coding tacit knowledge. An organizational story is a detailed narrative of management actions, employee interactions, and other intra organizational events that are communicated informally within the organization. Conveying information in a story provides a rich context, causing the story to remain in the conscious memory longer and creating more memory traces than is possible with information not in context. Stories can greatly increase organizational learning, communicate common values and rule sets, and serve as an excellent vehicle for capturing, coding, and transmitting valuable tacit knowledge.

 Questionnaires or Surveys – when a large group of people should be interviewed, a questionnaire could be a first step, followed by individual interviews. The questionnaire could include close-ended and/or open-ended questions. The latter are best for gaining more information as they do not limit the respondent to a set of predefined answers.

 Brainstorming or Ad-hoc Sessions – sessions of no more than 30 minutes for sharing ideas in a stimulating and focused atmosphere. They can take place as face-to-face meetings or make use of technologies such as instant messaging, e-mail, teleconferencing, and chat rooms.

 Focus Groups – include structured sessions in which a group of stakeholders is asked to share their views about a previously presented solution.

 Learning Histories (lessons learned debriefings)– represent a retrospective history of significant events that occurred in the organization's recent past, as described in the voice of the people who took part in them. The learning history process starts with planning which establishes the scope of the learning history to be captured. After that participants are asked to share their analysis, evaluation, and the judgment they used. Other insights emerge and the capture and codification of these insights helps increase the organization's reflective capacity. Next, the information that was gathered from the interviews is synthesized into a summary format that will make it very easy for others to access, read, and understand. The content is then written up, validated, and published in order to disseminate the learning history and to anchor it as part of the organizational memory. A learning history is thus a systematic review of successes and failures in order to capture best practices and lessons learned.

 Documentation – it could include documentation from existing systems, archival information, policies and procedural manuals, reports, memos, meeting notes, standards, e-mails, public regulations, other guides, etc.

 Participation – Learning-by-doing or on-the-job-training is invaluable both for experience and for obtaining knowledge. It is experimental, deductive learning that seeks to make sense of occurrences and to establish causal links between actions and outcomes. Apprenticeships, internships or traineeships and mentoring are forms of experienced skilled persons passing knowledge to a novice.

 Task Analysis – an approach that looks at each key task an expert performs and characterizes the tasks in terms of prerequisite knowledge/skills required, consequences of error, frequency, difficulty, and interrelationships with other tasks and individuals, as well as how the task is perceived by the person (routine, dreaded, or eagerly anticipated). It could be done by observation (silently) or as an interview by the knowledge engineer.

 Learning from others - can involve activities such as external benchmarking, which involves learning about what the leaders are doing in terms of their best practices, either through publications or site visits, and then adapting and adopting their best practices. Benchmarking helps identify better ways of doing business. Other learning sources include company acquisitions or mergers, attending conferences and expositions and commissioning specific studies. Inviting guest speakers to an organization presents yet another opportunity to bring a fresh perspective or point of view.