Review: Planning with Complexity – An Introduction to Collaborative Rationality for Public Policy

4 Star, Complexity & Resilience, Decision-Making & Decision-Support, Democracy
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Judith Innes, David Booher

4.0 out of 5 stars Excellent but Not Perfect, June 25, 2011

The authors claim to be addressing a new theory of collaborative rationality. The Native Americans called this “seventh generation thinking.” It is neither new nor rational alone, but rather holistic. I bought and read this book along with Democracy as Problem Solving: Civic Capacity in Communities Across the Globe, and the two go very well together. Both are directly founded on John Dewey's 1927 work, Public & Its Problems, and both fail to mention Will Durant's 1916 thesis, Philosophy and the Social Problem: The Annotated Edition.

Key ingredients are thinking differently, dialog as information discovery and exchange, and knowledge operations via dialog–Juanita Brown and David Isaacs call this The World Cafe: Shaping Our Futures Through Conversations That Matter.

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