Practices:Delphi survey

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The Delphi Survey is a particular collaborative process that is designed to improve group communications about a complex problem or topic. The objectives of a Delphi process are three-fold: (1) to gather the information which is needed to deal with the problem or topic and fill in the resulting knowledge structure; (2) to make sure this information can be understood by the many different backgrounds of the contributors; (3) to expose agreements and disagreements and trying to come up with various recommendations for actions of various types.

The Delphi method involves gathering of what might be a very large group of participants to consider a complex problem, usually about five people in each area of special knowledge or expertise needed to present and share information about the problem and various solutions to it. A knowledge structure allows the participants to place their comments, insights, and concerns in the appropriate location so a large involved discussion is easy to follow. Individual participants, usually anonymous when authoring items and when voting, have the ability to vote on contributions so the group can determine what specific things they agree or disagree on.

In the past, the Delphi Survey was largely done by paper and pencil communications and is now often done on the Web. Since the computer process or paper process keeps track of the contributions, what each individual has contributes, what they have read or seen, every participant can participate asynchronously at a time and place convenient for them.

Contents

Definitional aspects

Main article: Definitional aspects of the Delphi method

The basic Delphi concept is the design of a collaborative communication structure and process that is tailored to the nature of the problem and the nature of the group. Anonymity of the responses is one fundamental property so that people will feel free to express themselves and to be able to expose ideas that could turn out to be stupid as well as brilliant. The typical view of Delphi is that it has a round structure and goes through at least three phases:
1. Exploring the problem and exposing new insights and additional relevant material.
2. Gaining a collective understanding of the material generated.
3. Evaluating the material and hopefully reaching a consensus.

Many of the concepts underlying the Delphi Process have been adopted in other related methods: Prediction Markets, Recommender Systems, Collaborative Tagging or Folksonomies, and other Collaborative Systems. Over the past forty years, a number of specific Delphi Structures have been designed and are very popular in terms of successful usage. This includes the conditional forecasting of trends where the emphasis is generating the conditions that affect the trend forecast. A second is a problem solving Delphi structure to come up with an evaluated list of alternatives or options. The third is the Policy Delphi which is devoted to determining the alternative and complementary policy options to a policy issue and the arguments supporting each one. The fourth is the example of Cross Impact Analysis for building individual and group models of interaction among future events and scenarios. The specific area of cross impact analysis is a foundation for the creation of a Delphi based Planning process.

Delphi like processes

Main article: Delphi like processes

The name of Delphi was not chosen by the inventors of the method at RAND (Olaf Helmer and Norman Dalkey) but by their fellow professionals, since it was commonly used for future predictions. The strange name affixed to the Delphi process has not been favorable for the spread of this method. What has happened as a result is that many of the premises of Delphi have been rediscovered or renamed under other methods to use group processes to try to obtain some level of collective intelligence. This is the concept that the group can reach a higher quality result than any individual in the group would have acting alone[1]. The most common Delphi derivatives today are: collaborative tagging or folksonomies and recommender systems, prediction markets, wikis and collaborative systems for humans.

Examples of Delphi structures

Main article: Examples of Delphi structures

There are a number of "classic" structures that have been used very successfully many times in the past forty years and have been the basis of a number of proprietary organizational studies. They can each be used on a wide range of similar problems. Some of them have been utilized in online exercises using bulletin boards and auxiliary software such as survey packages. A few have been fully implemented in software.

The following are the general types of Delphi processes that apply to a large number of applications:

  • Trend Delphi: produces a forecast of a trend along with the mental model of the group making the extrapolation of the trend curve into the future.
  • Problem Solving Delphi: Collects solutions to the problem which are rescaled to a group interval scale based upon individuals ranking or paired comparisons. Use voting to focus discussion on items that need it.
  • Policy Delphi: seeks policy resolutions and the strongest pro and con evidence or arguments to support each policy resolution.
  • Cross Impact Modeling: Collaborative building of a model of the future possible outcomes of a set of unique events.

Sea also

Environmental Scanning & Monitoring
System Dynamics
Structural Analysis
Agent Modelling
SWOT Analysis
Trend Intra & Extrapolation
Modelling & Simulation
Gaming
Creativity Methods
Backcasting
S&T Roadmapping
Critical & Key Technology Study
Scenario Building
Morphological Analysis & Relevance Trees
Cross-Impact Analysis
Multi-Criteria Analysis

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