Delphi Method

Seventy-five years of patient work, and a door held open for you.

Iterative anonymous expert elicitation, engineered to defeat groupthink, anchoring, and hierarchy effects in forecasting.

Classification

Methodological lineage

1959

Brief / 01

Context record

The Delphi Method was developed at RAND by Olaf Helmer, Norman Dalkey, and colleagues to elicit expert judgment under conditions where direct group discussion would distort the answer. Participants respond anonymously, see the aggregated distribution, and revise, across several rounds.

The method's design is essentially adversarial to status: a junior researcher's estimate carries the same weight as a Nobel laureate's until the substance is examined.

On Futurecraft, Delphi-style elicitation underpins several Question Networks where contested estimates, timelines, probabilities, thresholds, need to be surfaced without being warped by the room's social geometry.

Origin

Helmer, Dalkey, Gordon · RAND · 1959

Applied To

· Long-horizon forecasting
· Contested estimates
· Expert calibration

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