Dialectics Decision Making (Socratic Method)
The dielectrics decision method (DDM) or Socratic method traces its roots back to Socrates and Plato. It helps to overcome such problems as converging too quickly one one solution while overlooking others, participants dislike of meetings, incomplete evaluations, and the failure to confront tough issues. The steps of DDM are:
- Issue a clear statement of the problem to be solved.
- Two or more competing proposals are generated.
- Members identify the explicit or implicit assumptions that underlie each proposal.
- The team then breaks into advocacy sub, who examine and argue the relative merits of their positions.
- The group reassembles and makes a decision:
- embrace one of the alternatives
- forge a compromise
- generate a new proposal
The process looks like this:
This process helps the members to better understand the proposals along with their pros and cons. The main disadvantage is the tendency to forge a compromise in order to avoid choosing sides.