The POD Delphi Study, 1978

Authors

Lance C. Buhl
Stephen C. Scholl

Date of this Version

Summer 1979

Document Type

Article

Comments

Published in the POD Quarterly, Vol. 1, No. 2 (Summer 1979)

Abstract

What a supreme irony-and a surefire sign of irrelevance-were the Professional and Organizational Network in Higher Education (POD) to become stagnant, maladaptive, and unresponsive. To stave off these beasts of bureaucratization, the POD Core Committee has regularly utilized some form of membership survey to guide program planning. The most recent attempt at such a democratic strategy began over a year ago. The impetus for the decision evolved out of the Committee's 1977-78 deliberations on defining the mission of POD. Given the charge in October, 1977 to draft such a statement and to manage the Core Committee's decision-making process with respect to it, the authors (Buhl and Scholl) quickly realized that a simple statement, however directional, was not likely to communicate terribly effectively what the organization was about or where it should be heading. It needed some sort of elaboration in terms of underlying values and of recognizable milestones along the way to realizing them. These ought, of course, to be widely shared (even consensually defined) values and markers. The idea of using the delphi process was not especially creative, though it had more than a bit of justice in it: POD itself was the product of some focussed talks among three handfuls of higher education "developers" (about 30 of them) in 1975. Those discussions were informed by a pre-meeting delphi process involving participants in projections about the future of organizational, faculty and instructional development (1). To augment the Core Committee's decision about a mission statement with another delphi was simply to round out the circle. Hopefully, this route will be traversed in one way or another from time to time in the future. May the paralyzing predators find other organizations to devour!

(1): Surveys of interests for program planning were conducted in early and late 1976, and the evaluation of the 1977 National Conference included a survey of conference program preferences. See the article "POD: The Founding of a National Network," POD Quarterly (Spring 1979) p. 12, for reference to the May, 1975 conference at Wingspread, Racine, Wisconsin.