The idea of thinking together is not much in vogue at present. Thinking, if it’s done well, happens over time, and of time we don’t seem to have much to spare. The value of thinking rests on the experience that not everything is obvious and simply has to be stated, as one’s settled view; that opinions can develop, in conversations; even change radically, for the better, for everyone.
Thinking allows for uncertainties, for a range of possibilities in the future. It accepts that there are likely to be gaps in our knowledge which need to be filled, if that’s possible; that we don’t know everything, even everything about a small issue. It accepts we may need to look something up, online, or in a library (still a central place for many communities); that it may be useful to speak with others who may know more about the issue than we do, or may have had experience in it that we don’t have.
Thinking implies a process of enlarging our knowledge, and of deepening it, of finding underlying ideas or principles that seem to govern parts of our lives together. And it suggests that thinking is a good thing to be doing, before we plunge into action, because we might then be more likely to get things right.
Yet, laid out even in these few sentences, thinking more than we do now is an idea that all seems to be too hard, and too intrusive, and certainly likely to take too long. So we tend not to do a lot of it. We’re not short on opinions but that kind of thinking is not likely to have been a part of making them. That has implications for our individual lives and for our lives together.
And there it is, the second word of the opening phrase: together. As soon as we say it, the questions crowd in. What does thinking together mean in practice? How many people are involved? Who are they and why are they there? What do they actually do, in a community? And what is supposed to come out of it – does it really matter whether it happens or not?
We can start by considering what form good thinking might take between two people. Those are, if you like, the units from which, when gathered, community emerges. Then we can consider what good thinking together might look like at that community level.
Conversation
What happens between two people when they sit down together to work something out, to think something through, if it is to be done well? It takes the form of conversation, of speaking and listening.
Theodore Zeldin, the British historian and commentator, has written a luminous little book about conversation, based on his popular BBC radio talks.1 In his view conversation is something that sits at the centre of human community: we want, he says, ‘to develop not talk but conversation, which does change people. Real conversation catches fire. It involves more than sending and receiving information.’
His interest is in the kind of conversation ‘which you start to emerge a slightly different person.’ He places no limits on this process: ‘conversation changes he world, and even changes the world.’ Conversation can make us more generous, he thinks; it can help us treat each other with more respect.
In the end, ‘what matters is whether you are willing to think for yourself, and to say what you think.’ In the end, ‘what matters most is courage.’
It’s something good to aspire to. Let’s look into it for a moment.
In thinking together — which is the kind of conversation we’re concerned with here — we each in turn attempt to put forward our view, or ideas, or case, as clearly as we can. How to do this well has received much attention, in academic and other contexts. It’s primarily a matter of content, expressing ideas as simply and clearly as we can, and organising them in a natural order. This sounds simpler than it is: we can get better at it with attention and practice. And it’s not just a matter of the intellect; feelings are an integral part of it. Speaking as well as we can about our feelings can help to build real communication between two people. Perhaps that’s where courage comes in.
The other part of thinking together face to face, listening, may easily get lost. In my experience, though, listening well is at least as important as speaking well, if a conversation is be coherent and useful.
Central to listening well is attending to what is being said. That is, actually hearing it, rather than filtering it through one’s own ideas or preconceptions. That doesn’t mean that my own thoughts and feelings are less important, simply that they need to be put aside while I am listening, in order to listen well. I may want to ask questions to clarify what the other is saying, to ensure that I’ve understood it in the way that she intends it, and haven’t missed or glossed over anything. Without that kind of attention to listening, from both sides, it’s difficult to see how misunderstandings can be avoided; as, indeed, is often the case.
Behind that are the two values, I think, which underpin all relationships: respect and trust. Much has been written about them, but I think we all have an intuitive sense of what they mean. Respect is a settled view of the humanity and dignity of every person – the view that every person is worthy of attention – of being heard, sympathetically, in a safe space over time. Trust, as I’ve suggested in chapter 2, emerges of itself in a space of that kind.
Michelle Boulous Walker has thrown an interesting light on what can shape that space best.2 Following the work of pioneering French feminists, she looks to ‘slow’ principles in engaging with others. I’ve drawn on her ideas in the title of these pieces, ‘slow community’.
Walker proposes that in attending to what the other says, we have to be entirely open to her, in whatever way she chooses to present herself, in whatever form it takes, even if entirely unfamiliar or strange to us. So we don’t jump to judgment or to opposition; we are open to uncertainty or puzzlement. We are committed to taking the time to work these matters through together, to coming back to the conversation, if necessary, to achieve real mutual understanding; hence, I’m suggesting, slow community. For Walker this is an ethical stance, something we should offer to each other. It is a central part of the commitment to mutual respect.
Thinking together, together
With these ideas about one-to-one thinking in mind, we can consider the nature of thinking well at the level of community. I’ve suggested that care is central for communities. Alongside it, as importantly, and drawing on it, is thinking together. A good community — which means a healthy community, for which the well-being of its people comes first — places thinking together at its centre. Thinking together is routinely put into practice and continually improved. It is valued, protected, and sustained.
We may assume that it is entirely natural for a community to be thinking together. After all, it is part of the daily fabric of family life, so embedded in it that usually we hardly notice it at all. And there are certainly degrees of community thinking in practice. It may happen in some part of community life, such as sporting clubs or special interest groups, and not in others, such as council planning or financial management, or it may happen hardly at all.
Of course this varies from culture to culture. Our First Nations peoples, for example, have long developed traditional ways of thinking and deciding together.3 They have told me that these ways are often called ‘sit down and talk’, a description that conveys much of the richness about what it is and how it’s done. But in community life this kind of talking happens far less often, and far less influentially, than it should.
One possible reason for that — a somewhat heretical view — may have to do with our reliance on the democratic structure that in this country we call local government. It’s an illuminating title because it expresses a scaled-down version of governments we are more familiar with, such as national and state. If it works in those large contexts, so the argument goes, why not at the local level? So we have the local council, voted for by ratepayers, which is then empowered to collect rates and to spend that money for, one hopes, local benefit. That, at least, is the logic.
But it doesn’t, in my view, work particularly well in practice, at the local level. At least, we might say, it’s not enough. Communities aren’t just collections of individual voters: they are people who make their lives together, depending in different ways on each other and on their collective strength. In the surges of this collective living, new things come up every day. Often there are strong feelings about them, because they matter personally, and often immediately. Voting for representatives once every four years stands a long way off from the living fabric of community life.
Various ways of mending this have been tried. These are often called deliberative, or participatory, methods. One, for example, is the citizen jury, which models community processes on courtroom jury deliberations.4 More common is the open community meeting, which may allow for episodic expressions of opinions.
But the development of community is about more than these isolated strategies. It is about mutually agreed ways of thinking together that become a part of community life.
Going about it
Here are some thoughts about good thinking together. To begin the process there needs to be a group, or groups, of people in the community who want to think together and are committed to it. This is not a small step: the intention and the commitment coming into the process takes it forward, and makes it possible to work through the challenges that inevitably arise. It doesn’t need to take an organised form, although loose scheduling may support continuity.
The focus of gatherings can range from a particular issue, to a number of related issues, to any emerging issue. It is open to the community at large. There are no membership barriers, and it is recognised that people may come and go. There is no election of a group, no representation: through these groups the community is speaking as a person in its own right, with its own dignity and recognition. It has standing.
Initiatives along these lines have arisen in some places in Australia. In our town, for example, there is at the moment a loosely organised working group looking at a long-running heritage issue about which swirl strong community feelings. A Victorian council has supported open, ongoing working groups from the community to meet regularly to look at the core areas of local life, such as infrastructure, environment, economic vitality, and health and well-being.
These structures and processes recognise that, entirely reasonably, people in the community are more likely to gravitate to the issues and areas in which they’re most interested. The continuity of such groups is important. Over time, not only are the outcomes of thinking together likely to be increasingly valuable, but the sense of autonomy and local control is sustained.
The learning community
Thinking together over time can take the form of a learning community, in which learning together becomes central to the process of thinking together. Of course there will always be things that lie outside our collective knowledge, or expertise, or experience. New knowledge will always be required for new directions.
The question is how best to find it. Some of that knowledge may come from printed sources, public or private. Or it may be found in the vast online holdings (noting that increasingly these are more difficult to authenticate). In a community, however, the most valuable material is likely to be already available somewhere among the people of the community. And there may be other communities where similar issues have come up and whose experience can be drawn on.
My approach has been to start by identifying these people and asking them to share their experience. They may also point to other repositories of relevant experience and knowledge. But whatever source is drawn on to meet important gaps in the collectively-held knowledge, there is no doubt that good thinking together will need them. Over time the group becomes more familiar with this process and gets better at it. Central to a good learning community is learning how to learn.
There is more to say about this process: how the information gathered is best captured and shared; how it can be brought to the table, and looked at together; how the results of that work, meeting by meeting, can be regularly shared with the community at large; how community feedback is invited and heard; and so on. Every group will work through these questions for themselves. What is essential, in my experience, is simply the recognition that we may not know everything we need to know in order to reach good shared conclusions, or even just to see our way clear to the next step.
Groups explore their thoughts together in their own ways. They may just talk and listen; most do that. They can write down numbers if that seems useful. Often visual approaches work well: everyone can draw shapes and lines around ideas and their connections, and the developing visual dialogue can be viewed, and changed, together. That can be done on a computer and projected on a wall, or a screen, for everyone to see. Or paper and markers do just as well. There are no rules: whatever works for the particular group, what everyone in it feels comfortable with, is the best guideline.
Local knowledge
An important part of the learning community is the opportunity it provides for local knowledge to enter the discussion. Local knowledge is knowledge of a special kind. It naturally forms itself around daily living. It can be something that everyone who is part of the community knows, but that others outside it may not; such as, in our coastal town, the storm surge conditions that lead to occasional flooding of the main street. It may be more specialised local knowledge, such as the accumulated experience of some of our locals from years of surfing the southern ocean beaches. Or it can be social knowledge, such as the experience of local families, or the elderly.
I’ve found, however, that often it’s seen as knowledge or information that isn’t valuable, even by those who hold it; ‘everyone knows that’ tends to be its label But it can in truth be something that is critical input for a discussion. So the question needs to be asked: ‘What do we already know about this?’ The answer can be surprising, even overturning ideas about what we thought everyone knew. And because it comes out of experience, it has some authenticity, something that can be counted on.
Here’s a little story about local knowledge. A couple in our town have lived for decades in a shack near the coast. There are some small rocky islets off the coast, where seals come ashore to breed. The man took it on himself to swim out regularly to the rocks, to clear away the rubbish that washed up there, so that the seals and their pups wouldn’t be injured when they arrived. He said to me, ‘You could put me down underwater anywhere between the beach and those rocks, and I’ll tell you where we are and what’s been going on there.’
When state scientists arrived recently to look at the welfare of the seal colony over the breeding period, he offered them his long knowledge and experience of the seals and their environs. ‘But they weren’t interested,’ he said to me, ‘probably wasn’t real science.’ I assured him that it was, and highly valued, but he wasn’t convinced. The scientists’ view is mistaken and outdated. Today it’s well recognised that local knowledge, citizen science, and environmental science, go best together.5
Jules Pretty points out that often locally-held knowledge can take the form of stories, some of which may even be handed on over generations:
‘Good stories carry useful information about what to do and not do. They are rehearsal without the reality of physical and social dangers. They guide us, offer paths out of tight spots, or indeed ways to avoid them in the first place.’6
Thinking into action
So where does this work of thinking together lead? Because, although people in a community group are likely to enjoy simply being together, it does take some work. We might say, it can lead to a conclusion; but that objectifies it, removes it to a degree from the group that is doing the thinking. As better goal might be, that it can lead to a common understanding among the people of the group, a consensus. That doesn’t have to be agreed on by everybody, or in the same way by everybody. Some may be convinced, others less so. And it doesn’t have to be set in stone. The work of thinking together can continue, if some matters are unresolved, or it can be expanded. People can change their minds, or come up with new ideas. Thinking together is always open, never closed.
At the same time, the group’s consensus may be firm enough be moved into action. That is, after all, the main practical purpose of thinking together. Other processes come into play then, to bring the consensus into practice. Again, though, it’s not set in stone. Things change around us and changes may be needed in response to it. It’s not a straight line: rather an emerging, adaptive, flexible approach to going forward. We may need to bring it back to the group to think through what’s needed. Certainly the ongoing presence and support of the thinking together group, with their accumulated knowledge and interest, is very helpful.
Thinking things through not only brings the right knowledge and the best knowledge to meet shared challenges, but builds the community fabric along the way. It’s worth growing and protecting. I’m with Theodore Zeldin, who, in concluding his little book, writes ‘I would be really glad if you were to tell me what you think.’
1T Zeldin, Conversation: how talk can change your life, The Harvill Press, London, 1998.
2M B Walker, Slow Philosophy: Reading Against the Institution. Bloomsbury Academic, London, 2017.
3The Australian Indigenous Governance Institute (AIGI), ‘Indigenous Governance Toolkit’ https://aigi.org.au/toolkit
4 Gastil, J., & Levine, P.,The deliberative democracy handbook : strategies for effective civic engagement in the twenty-first century, Jossey-Bass, New Jersey, 2005.
5M Tengö, B Austin, F Danielsen, & A Fernández-Llamazares, ‘Creating synergies between citizen science and indigenous and local knowledge’, BioScience, 2021, 71(5):503–518.
6Jules Pretty, ‘What Makes Good Story’. Published at www.julespretty.com, 2024.
This article is made available under a Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0
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