Engineering Dialectical Inquiry: Lessons Learned from Lab Explorations

A Design Science approach is applied to the engineering of a dialectical inquiry process for group model building. Insights from three research streams in collaboration literature are used for the practical engineering of a facilitation script. Dialectical inquiry is the process developed by Churchman and used in Comprehensive Situation Mapping (CSM) as recently described by Acar and Druckenmiller. The software artifact developed for this approach was tested with usability testing to compare the ease of use of this computerized technique with the original manual method. While this software was easy to learn and to use, its development did not fully address the accompanying facilitation model that provided a tested script for use in actual field cases. This research uses the principles of user-centered design as an iterative search component of the Design Science approach. Its application to the development of such scripts, as well as the initial results of an exploratory phase of testing are described.