Ethical Engineering: Definitions, Theories and Techniques - Ethical Engineering for International Development and Environmental Sustainability - page 46

3. The facilitator helps the other participants consider the drawbacks of the poten-
tial solution and iteratively suggests other solutions to retain the advantages and
reduce the drawbacks of previous solutions.
4. Continuing the process iteratively until the solution cannot be improved further.

Action-science dialogue has the following seven implementation rules (Argyris
et al. 1985 ), which are not necessarily sequential:

1. Combine advocacy with inquiry.
2. Illustrate your inferences with fairly directly observable data.
3. Make your reasoning explicit and publicly test for agreement at each inferential
step.
4. Actively seek contrary data and alternative explanations.
5. Recognise that mistakes occur and you can learn from them.
6. Actively investigate your impact on the learning context.
7. Design ongoing experiments to test competing views.

Action-inquiry dialogue has the following four components (Torbert 1987 ):

1. Framing: determining the frame or purpose of everyone's not just the speaker's
participation.
2. Advocating: what the speaker proposes in the frame.
3. Illustrating: using a concrete example to clarify what the speaker means.
4. Inquiring: how the others respond to the speaker's perspective and initiative.

All three dialogue methods can be used to change both values and behaviour, but
require a certain degree of consensus from the dialogue participants for success. The
iterative Socratic method is explicitly friendly and respectful and may be the most
appropriate with less powerful people, people from cultures where there is little
experience of advocacy and directness, and/or subordinates fearful of being misun-
derstood if they present different perspectives. Action-science is the most thorough
as it explicitly uses new experimental and experiential data and multiple alternatives.
It is therefore likely to take the longest. Action-inquiry is the most focused on the
required action and therefore likely to be the fastest and most direct. It is also possible
to combine elements of the different methods, for instance, to add explicit friendliness
to the action-science method or experimentation to action-inquiry.

3.5.4 Triple-Loop Action Learning

Triple-loop methods include (1) Woolman's friendly disentangling, (2) friendly
upbuilding, (3) friendly reconstruction, (4) (adversarial) deconstruction and
(5) experimental neopragmatism.
Woolman's ( 1774 ) friendly disentangling method has four main components:

1. Framing a 'we' fellowship relationship with others and seeking the cause of
current problematic behaviour in biases of the embedded tradition.
2. Approaching others in a friendly way.