Compare methods

	Delphi Method for Strategy Foresight	Analytic Hierarchy Process for Strategic Priorities
Field	Strategic Management	Strategic Management
Family	Process / pipeline	MCDM
Year of origin	1975	1980
Originator	Harold Linstone & Murray Turoff; Gene Rowe & George Wright	Thomas L. Saaty
Type	Iterative structured expert-elicitation process for foresight	Multi-criteria decision analysis via pairwise comparison
Seminal source	Linstone, H. A., & Turoff, M. (Eds.). (1975). The Delphi Method: Techniques and Applications. Addison-Wesley. ISBN: 9780201042948	Saaty, T. L. (1980). The Analytic Hierarchy Process: Planning, Priority Setting, Resource Allocation. New York: McGraw-Hill. ISBN: 9780070543713
Aliases	Corporate Delphi Foresight, Strategic Expert-Panel Forecasting, Policy Delphi for Strategy, Iterative Expert Elicitation for Foresight	Strategic AHP Prioritization, AHP for Strategy Decisions, Pairwise Strategic Priority Setting, Hierarchical Strategic Decision Weighting
Related	4	3
Summary	The Delphi method is a structured process for combining the judgments of a panel of experts on questions where hard data are scarce - long-range forecasts, emerging technologies, and strategic uncertainties - through several rounds of anonymous response and controlled feedback. Linstone and Turoff's 1975 collection The Delphi Method: Techniques and Applications established the canonical design and its variants, including the policy Delphi used to explore strategic options rather than to pin down a single estimate. Rowe and Wright's 1999 International Journal of Forecasting review distilled the evidence on what makes Delphi work, identifying anonymity, iteration, controlled statistical feedback, and aggregation of the final round as the procedure's defining features. In strategy and corporate foresight, Delphi is used to forecast technology timelines, prioritize uncertainties, and build expert consensus to inform long-horizon decisions.	The Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) applied to strategic priorities is a multi-criteria decision method that structures a complex strategy choice into a hierarchy of goal, criteria, and alternatives, then derives priority weights from expert pairwise comparisons. Thomas Saaty developed AHP in the 1970s and set out its full theory in his 1980 book, with a widely cited 1990 article distilling how to make a decision with the method. Its appeal for strategy is that it converts the qualitative judgments managers actually make — that growth matters more than cost control, say — into ratio-scale weights, while quantifying and policing the consistency of those judgments. The result is a transparent, defensible ranking of strategic options that integrates multiple, often conflicting, criteria.