Thinking Together

Included in the initial draft of a new book that my long-time friend and colleague, Charlie Irish, and I are writing, is an entire chapter devoted to the power of deliberation.  In this chapter of Cleaning Up the Mess from Sacred Cows:  A Strategy to Save Our Public Schools, we share a powerful quote from an essay for the Kettering Foundation in which Scott London writes that the objective of deliberative dialogue is not so much to talk together but to think together:  “Deliberative dialogue differs from other forms of public discourse — such as debate, negotiation, brainstorming, and consensus-building — because the objective is not so much to talk together as to think together, not so much to reach a conclusion as to discover where a conclusion might lie.  Thinking together involves listening deeply to other points of view, exploring new ideas and perspectives, searching for points of agreement, and bringing unexamined assumptions into the open.”