The facilitator trial in five stages

Facilitation (Pronoia)

You have a trial of Delphi Pronoia. In ten minutes this guide walks you through what running a Delphi study actually involves.

The stages are written as goals: each one says what you are trying to find out, not which button to press. Finding the route is part of the trial — and if you can't find it, that is the most valuable thing you can tell us.

1. Open your own example study

The invitation link lets you create an account and a password. After that your desk holds a study that already has a panel, theses and answers. It is yours: you can change anything in it without breaking anything.

Goal: find out what the study asks and how many people have answered.

Both answers are on the Theses and Panelists tabs. Note the basics of the method while you are there: a thesis is a claim to take a position on, not a question.

2. See where the panel landed

Goal: find one thesis the panel disagrees on, and find out on what grounds.

The distribution shows how the answers fell. Below it are the statistics: mean, median, standard deviation and the middle half. In a Delphi study the spread is often more interesting than the mean, because it tells you whether the panel is of one mind or split.

The reasoning, though, is why Delphi studies are run at all. Read it and see whether the disagreement lies in the ratings or only in the reasons behind them.

3. Read the dialogue

Goal: find a place where someone revised their position, and work out what changed it.

Panelists comment on each other's reasoning and may revise their own rating. The revision and its reason are stored separately. This is what separates a Delphi study from a survey: the material keeps a record of which argument moved whom.

4. Change something

Goal: add one thesis of your own and see how it looks to a panelist.

Use the panelist preview: you see the same view as your panel, and nobody is notified. It is the fastest way to check whether a thesis makes sense.

Keep one rule in mind: a thesis added while a round is open means that part of the panel answered a different set from the rest. Pronoia does not prevent it, but it does record it.

5. Build a study of your own

Goal: take one real question of yours as far as the theses.

The wizard on your desk asks for the variation (Argument, Classic, Real-Time or Barometer), the number of rounds and the default scale. On the AI panelists tab you can add synthetic perspectives if you want to see the dialogue move without a real panel.

When you invite real panelists, the Invitations tab creates a personal link for each of them. You can send them from Pronoia or copy them into your own email.

The limits of the trial

Hitting a limit is not an error but the end of the trial. Tell us what you were doing, and we will agree on what comes next.

Tell us what didn't work

At the bottom of the screen there is Share an observation. Use it freely. The valuable part is not that something was broken, but where you looked first and what you expected to happen. Pronoia's most common defect is a feature that exists but cannot be reached from the screen where it is needed — and only a new user can see that.