Structured Dialogic Design

Dialogue process? Created by Alexander Christakis http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Christakis; book ISBN:1517757649

Rebecca Valentine description of process.

http://globalagoras.org/category/sdd/

NCDD http://ncdd.org/rc/item/2884/:

Structured Dialogic Design (SDD) is the dialogue and decision-making methodology used by the Institute for 21st Century Agoras and others in their ‘co-laboratories of democracy.’

SDD honors individual autonomy in the group dialogue, respecting everyone’s words, and allowing their careful clarification

At all stages of SDD, interactive software records, prints, and projects the words of participants and then graphically represents their conclusions in real time. SDD sessions begin with a carefully crafted triggering question. After the group has posted and clarified their answers/observations to this question, they vote individually for the observations that they consider most important, and the votes are tallied. These votes produce a ranking of the observations on the basis of their perceived importance.

The observations that receive the most votes are ranked according to their influence on each other.

the software produces a “tree of meaning” (influence pattern) (concept map? cf current reality tree) where the deep drivers are at the roots and the lines of influence among the observations are traced.

The roots of the tree are the leverage points where groups can effect real and enduring change throughout the rest of the tree.

Groups that fasten on what they think is most important are doomed to futility if they are not attending to a situation’s influential leverage points.

In the action phase, they do not create an influence tree. Instead, they break into small groups and, utilizing the action items already ranked by importance, they create scenarios that they think will best address their problematic situations.

Structured Dialogue fundamentally differs from many other methodologies that poll stakeholders to find out what problem they think is most important, or what action they deem most effective, but do not probe deeper, proceeding directly to prescribing action plans to meet problems and effect change. These plans usually fail because they fail to identify the crucial leverage points.

SDD enables participants to engage in “focused and open dialogue.” In SDD, people generate and clarify the meanings of a large number of observations, efficiently produce “team-based patterns,” and use graphic displays of the relationships among their observations

A pivotal example of this failure of simple dialogue occurred during the originating days of the Club of Rome, circa 1970

They conversed profitably within their own disciplines, but they were frustrated in their attempts to converse across disciplines. Soon it became obvious to one of the founders of the Club of Rome, Alexander Christakis, that differences in language, expectations, semantics, and outlooks were blocking and diverting abilities to hold fruitful ongoing conversations

Subsequently, at the Battelle Institute, the University of Virginia, and George Mason University, Christakis and John Warfield developed Interactive Management (IM) that enables dialogue to work in “wicked” situations. In 1989, Christakis took IM into corporate arenas and began to refine it into SDD.