Collective Decision-Making

Case studies of the different knowledge cultures involved in Western decision-making provided details of the ways decisions are made about the future. Individuals reflect on their own lived experience. Communities provide first-hand knowledge of the effects of change. Specialized knowledge is objective and reliable, within single frameworks. Organizational knowledge offers the political and administrative systems that can ensure the desired change. Holistic knowledge illuminates the essence or core purpose. Yet all of these are needed for mutual decisions towards a healthy, just and sustainable future (Brown 2006). Each knowledge culture was found to reject the contributions of the others. Individual knowledge is dismissed as anecdote, community knowledge as gossip, specialist knowledge as jargon, organisational knowledge as plotting, and holistic knowledge as airy-fairy. Yet all five knowledge cultures have to learn to accept each other's contribution if there is to be a constructive synthesis. A sustainable synthesis calls for commitment to respecting their individual contributions while strengthening their connections. This represents a fundamental change in the way we think. Tools found to assist in this transformational change include David Bohm's Rules of Dialogue, namely, maintain open communication, suspend judgment, separate inquiry and advocacy, clarify assumptions, listen to yourself, and remain open to the unexpected Bohm 1996). Concerted change requires all the knowledge cultures to join in the stages of open learning, as described by David Kolb: developing principles, defining parameters, designing for potential and doing and reviewing the new practice (Keen, Brown, and Dyball 2005). These suggested strategies for collective thinking were tested in three sites: an isolated desert town wanting a green town park, a tightly-packed beach-side suburb needing to control oceans of tourist waste, and an Indigenous community wishing to become self-supporting. Three years later, all had achieved their goals and established pathways for collective thinking.