Feeds:
Posts
Comments

Archive for the ‘Deliberation’ Category

What Do We Think? available

Posted in Collective Wisdom, Decision Making, Deliberation, Deliberative Polling, Opinion, Sustainability, Wisdom of Crowds on November 17, 2011 | Leave a Comment »

A new draft of What Do We Think?  Divining the Public Wisdom to Guide Sustainability Decisions is now available. Download PDF

Read Full Post »

What do we think? Part 3: A virtual forum, and why it might work

Posted in Collective Wisdom, Deliberation, Deliberative Polling, Democracy, Opinion, Polling, Sustainability, Wisdom of Crowds on October 15, 2011 | Leave a Comment »

List the features you’d want to see in a mechanism for identifying public wisdom. These requirements mean the mechanism would have to be internet based – i.e. a kind of national virtual forum. Such a forum would face a range of major challenges, but there’s reason to think these could be handled.

Read Full Post »

What do we think? Part 2: Why we should know but don’t

Posted in Collective Wisdom, Deliberation, Deliberative Polling, Democracy, Opinion, Polling, Sustainability, Wisdom of Crowds on October 14, 2011 | Leave a Comment »

We need the public wisdom because politically it would help governments make decisions; and on some issues would be the best guide to what the right decision would be. However we almost never know what the public wisdom is. Deliberative polling is our best current mechanism for finding out, but is too cumbersome and expensive to fully meet the need.

Read Full Post »

What do we think? Part 1: Public Attitude versus Public Wisdom

Posted in Collective Wisdom, Deliberation, Deliberative Polling, Democracy, Opinion, Polling, Sustainability, Wisdom of Crowds on October 14, 2011 | 3 Comments »

Governments must make lots of decisions for Australia to make a smooth and timely transition to sustainability. Those decisions are constrained by public opinion; therefore we need to know what the public thinks. Standard opinion polls identify the public attitude, which falls far short of the public wisdom.

Read Full Post »

Four Grades of Collective Wisdom

Posted in Collective Wisdom, Deliberation, Deliberative Polling, Wisdom of Crowds on August 16, 2011 | 1 Comment »

Much of what Austhink does these days is concerned with “collective wisdom” – the knowledge that a group as a whole has.   As Surowiecki famously pointed out, when the conditions are right, the wisdom of the group can be superior to that of the individuals making it up. However finding out what that collective [...]

Read Full Post »

Ask a stupid question…

Posted in Belief, Climate Change, Deliberation, Democracy, Opinion, Polling on June 3, 2011 | 7 Comments »

A new national poll finds: “A clear majority of Australian electors oppose the Gillard Government’s plan to introduce a carbon tax, 37% support the proposed carbon tax and 10% can’t say.” “A majority (64%) believes that Australia’s proposed carbon tax will make no difference to the world’s climate.” Political scientist James Fishkin, in his landmark [...]

Read Full Post »

Layered visual argument

Posted in Argument, Argumentation, Deliberation, Reasoning, Visual Deliberation on April 4, 2011 | 1 Comment »

A brilliant cartoon presents four arguments visually, and its main argument implicitly.

Read Full Post »

Arguing is not pointless…

Posted in Argument, Argumentation, Deliberation on February 11, 2011 | 6 Comments »

Peter Bregmen in Harvard Business Review argues that arguing is pointless. Arguing is of course not pointless, but must be done tactfully – as explained by Benjamin Franklin.

Read Full Post »

Elements of a major business decision

Posted in Argument, Boards, Business, Decision Making, Deliberation, Evidence-based decision on December 9, 2010 | 6 Comments »

The crime of murder has a set of elements – key things which must be established. Similarly, there are elements for major business decisions.

Read Full Post »

Decisions in Organisations – Four Kinds

Posted in Decision Making, Deliberation on November 3, 2010 | 3 Comments »

Decisions come in many different kinds. When thinking about decisions in large organisations, it is useful to distinguish the Intuitive, the Technical, the Deliberative, and the Bureaucratic.

Read Full Post »

Older Posts »

Follow

Get every new post delivered to your Inbox.