ABSTRACT
My intellectual journey has been grounded in a desire to improve the quality of public decisions. As child in Boston I observed major planning blunders and as staff to a congressman I witnessed uninformed decision making. My fi rst idea was to develop better data, but later I realized that information would have to be socially constructed in dialogue for users to be motivated to act on it. In the third phase I learned how power in society can distort information and groupthink can blind us to underlying realities. This idea led me to Habermas, who proposed a dialectical process among diverse voices to challenge assumptions and drill down to robust understandings. The latter offered a critical lens on the collaborative policy dialogues I was observing and allowed David Booher and me to develop normative theory for how collaboration can be rational, though in a different sense from the positivist version of the term. We found that facilitators’ best practices largely mirrored the conditions Habermas laid out for communicative rationality, and that when they did so, long-term improvements occurred in practices and institutions for decision making.
