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The history behind it is fairly innocuous, as far as that goes. Apprently, the RAND corporation in the early 1960's wanted a "think tank" approach to the possibility of the cold war tensions escalating to a full scale nuclear war. A centralized clearing house approach was envisoned, using the hegelian dialectic of thesis, antithesis, synthesis as the article mentions. A series of questions was submitted to numerous noted experts and authorities and interested governmental agencies, et al. After the data was collected, new questions and data were crunched and new questionaires submitted. The important thing to note, none of the participants were in contact with each other, etc. Rinse, lather, repeat.

Anyway, this model of "consensus" building was adapted to fit in business, local government and academia, etc. What is called the "delphi technique" in popular usage today is what the original article references, there is nothing neutral about it. It was the melding of radical, leftist anarchist types coupled with this method that it found its true efficacy. See "Rules for Radicals", and "Institute for Social Research" for more eye opening stuff.

What it does, in aggregate is give the voters/taxpayers/citizens/employees the illusion that they have been consulted even remotely on what is in reality a foregone conclusion dictated from on high by whatever agency is pulling the scam. The beauty of it lays whereby those holding sensible, mainstream views are led to believe they are in the minority viewpoint, and extremist, dogmatic, etc. It's also a handy method of identifying certain folks for a little "extra attention" in other avenues of life. It is nothing new, when I mentioned this to my aged father, he related to local school board members utilizing this to great effectiveness in the 1960's. While I don't know a lot about "Robert's Rules of Order", I suspect the "delphi technique" was tailored to expunge this bit of rational order. Parents walked out of those meetings knowing they'd been had, they just didn't know how. This article explains a lot. Too little too late, since the "agents of change" have virtually all of the appropriate agencies are staffed by "yes men/women" who are good party apparatchiks.