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Structured Democratic Dialogue – The research behind True Causes

True Causes is built on Structured Democratic Dialogue, the method that grew out of John Warfield’s Interactive Management and was developed by Alexander Christakis and Yiannis Laouris. It is not new: fifty years of peer-reviewed work, hundreds of documented dialogues. Laouris and Christakis called it harnessing collective wisdom, and named scale as its hardest limit; lifting that limit is what True Causes is for. A few deliberate departures. One of them: the method keeps every idea attached to its author's name throughout, and its practitioners argue anonymity weakens accountability. Here nobody is named inside a dialogue, because in a workplace or a divided community the name is what stops people writing the true card. We think the trade is right; it is untested. See the research. The mechanism science around it, the rules tested against bloc voting, and the implementation are what we add.

• John N. Warfield & A. Roxana Cárdenas — Interactive Management and Interpretive Structural Modelling; spreadthink; the laws of requisite variety, parsimony and saliency. A Handbook of Interactive Management, 2nd ed., Iowa State University Press, 1994 — out of print; the manuscript is free from the Warfield archive.
• Alexander N. Christakis & Kenneth C. Bausch — Structured Democratic Dialogue as a democratic practice. How People Harness Their Collective Wisdom and Power, Information Age Publishing, 2006.
• Yiannis Laouris & Alexander N. Christakis — running the method in a virtual setting, and scale named as its hardest limit: what True Causes sets out to lift. Harnessing collective wisdom at a fraction of the time using Structured Dialogic Design Process in a virtual communication context, International Journal of Applied Systemic Studies 1(2), 131–153, 2007.
• Kevin M. Dye — the erroneous priorities effect: importance votes cast before the relations among ideas are examined prove wrong once they are. First observed by Kapelouzos in 1989. Dye & Conaway, Lessons Learned from Five Years of Application of the CogniScope Approach to the FDA, 1999; defined and measured in Laouris & Michaelides, European Journal of Operational Research, 2018.
• W. Ross Ashby — the law of requisite variety: only variety absorbs variety. An Introduction to Cybernetics, Chapman & Hall, 1956 — full text, Principia Cybernetica.
• George A. Miller — the limits of a group's working attention, the reason questions are asked one at a time. The magical number seven, plus or minus two. Psychological Review 63(2), 1956.
• Yiannis Laouris and colleagues, Future Worlds Center — more than 120 documented co-laboratories, including the practice thresholds True Causes implements. Laouris & Dye, Five generations of evolution of dialogic design, Systems Research and Behavioral Science 41(2), 2024 · Laouris & Metcalf, Assessing the viability of virtual structured democratic dialogue, Systems Research and Behavioral Science 42(3), 2025 · Laouris, integrating asynchronous influence maps, 2023.
• Benjamin Broome, Michael Hogan and colleagues — Interactive Management studied and applied independently of the line above, as a method of collective intelligence, and the facilitation it depends on. Razzante, Hogan, Broome, Tracy, Chawla & Skurzak, Interactive Management research in organizational communication, Management Communication Quarterly 37(4), 971–989, 2023 · Hogan, Harney, Broome et al., A group dynamics framework for 21st century collective intelligence facilitators, Systems Research and Behavioral Science 38(4), 2021.
• Cynthia R. Farina and colleagues, Cornell eRulemaking Initiative — online participation in complex public policy: more participants is not better participation. People need the facts a question turns on, their input has to reach someone who answers it, and voting on ideas rewards what is popular rather than what is useful. The briefing a room can carry, the recipient named with a date, and the hint on cards too vague to judge follow from it. Farina, Epstein, Heidt & Newhart, Designing an online civic engagement platform: balancing “more” vs. “better” participation in complex public policymaking, International Journal of E-Politics 5(1), 16–40, 2014.

The wider literature: Structured Democratic Dialogue · Interpretive Structural Modelling · Interactive Management. Our own simulations and their results ship with the software and are described in the notes bundled with it.