The Noble Lie

If you’re going to fight the Beast in any kind of facilitated meeting settings, learn these tricks. They will be used on you, and that includes at your workplace, at your town hall, and on up the ladder.

It was originally created by the Rand corporation as a process to forge consensus. I think what these sites call the “Delphi Technique” has begun to expand into a whole category of deceptive practices used in meetings, but I’m sure that the original Rand Delphi Method was heavily influenced by some of these dirty tricks.

• The Delphi Technique, what is it?
• Using the Delphi Technique to achieve consensus
• Delphi Method [Wikipedia]
• How to disrupt the Delphi Technique

I’ve noticed part of the facilitated mass meeting process is that most discussion is done by breaking up into separate small groups. Those groups are made to forge a consensus which one spokesperson will speak. The facilitators go from group to group, profiling people, occasionally shooting down an opinion in the small group setting.

To boil down the trick to fighting back against the Delphi technique, you must not allow yourself to be incited or pigeonholed by the facilitator, you must remain calm but also focused, not letting them divert or talk their way around your questions. They will try to make you the bully, so the group will turn against you. Unless they are really good, they will eventually become the bully they tried to make you out to be, because they must defeat or divert the dissent in one way or another.