Marla Crockett: All of these different communities are holding forums, and they’ve done them in various ways, tailoring them to their particular groups and their communities. In some cases deliberation has occurred, in some cases it isn’t clear and in some cases it hasn’t happened. So why does it matter that deliberation happens?

Keith Melville: One answer is that there are some very real choices that face every community in the country. Deliberation matters because it’s a matter of consequence to those communities and the nation as a whole. Those decisions are made in part by ordinary people living in those communities, and thinking about education is an important part of thinking about our future. It’s that simple.

Bob Kingston: These problems are not easy. If there were an easy answer, as our good friend Daniel Yankelovich used to say, they would have been solved years ago. They aren’t made any easier because several of us think we know an answer. In order to discover what will serve us all, we have to find out what each of us thinks is the goal and what are the various things that [prevent] us from reaching that goal. It’s only by talking to each other that we can begin to discover what is common about our frustration and what is common about our purpose. It is essentially the function of deliberation to understand what is shared.

Marla: What are the obstacles to deliberation once you get all those people in the room?

Bob: First, let me say that anything that’s an obstacle to deliberation—and I’m sure there are many of them—should be recognized as a temporary impediment, not an insurmountable obstacle. When we sit down to talk about a problem—particularly if it is a vexing problem in which we know we really do have a stake—there are just a couple of few things we’re inclined to do first. And one of them is simply gripe, just complain about how bad it is and what’s wrong about it. And in a sense, it is temporarily satisfying indeed, but it does not necessarily help us move forward. Another obstacle is, we clearly recognize that somebody else is at fault. So the next thing to anger is blame. I don’t mean people are shouting at each other, but we have a kind of feeling that someone has let our side down and isn’t doing what they’re supposed to be doing. And something else that has to be gone through is [our] notion of what needs to be done. One of the obstacles to deliberation is the personal. And one of the points of appeal about a deliberative forum is bringing people together to talk about those problems and the blame for those problems and about the opportunities they’d like to see individually.

Keith: What happens in the initial phases is, it is a gripe session, it is finger pointing. And it’s not a heck of a lot more than that for a while. Typically deliberation doesn’t start until people get into the discussion and reach a certain point of saying, ‘Well, what should we do?’ Then what tends to happen is there’s kind of a deep breath and the discussion starts over or starts at a different point: what is the problem, and is there any commonality about what it is and is there anything we can do? People start to recognize that there really are some tensions between moving in this direction or that other direction and those tensions aren’t abstractions: ‘They affect me and this community, they affect my own willingness to change something I might do.’

Marla: These different communities are working with different constituencies. In some cases, you have groups reaching out to organizations they haven’t dealt with before. Then you have groups that are reaching out to constituencies they know very well or have a strong political relationship with— say, superintendents of schools. So how do you deal-- in a deliberation--with people you don’t know, versus [dealing] with people you need for your very success as an organization?

Keith: You certainly need all those groups in the meeting. And you almost certainly need an initial phase in which certain kinds of people—representing the mayor or some kind of special constituency—say their pre-packaged piece, which is what they’ve been saying in many other meetings. What you try to make happen is for it to move to a point where it’s more an exchange of what people believe themselves. It’s difficult for people to come in with a preconceived sense or position. That’s politics as usual. You’re trying to do something different from that. It’s not easy to get from politics as usual to something more deliberative.

Bob: That’s the real crux and a very hard one. Whenever dealing with something that’s a genuine public policy problem, then almost inevitably there are interests at stake. But what we’re talking about is something profoundly different. It’s called public deliberation—not institutional argument, debate or negotiation—but public deliberation. So in order to achieve that, everybody—despite his or her club membership—is in fact an individual who has certain values that are offended by some actions, advanced by other kinds of actions, and the intent is not to explore formal positions of institutions to which we belong, but the attitudes of mind and behavior that determine the way in which we live our different lives. And it’s by exploring those different values that we find what links us, as distinct from what divides us in the institutional level of politics.

Marla: I want to go back and make sure we all understand what that word “deliberation” means. How would you define it?

Keith: I would define it as attentiveness to the differences in the views, positions and approaches that people in a community have and a willingness to be informed by those differences—to listen to why people disagree about certain things. The act of deliberation includes listening to those differences and then taking some part of those differences into account, about what should be done.

Bob: Our friend and colleague David Mathews [President of the Kettering Foundation] always reminds us that the word “deliberation” comes from the word meaning a set of scales, “libra,” a weighing machine. And in fact, deliberation is the weighing of different ways of thinking. One weighs what somebody feels should be done against what somebody else feels should be done and it’s this weighing of different attitudes—or of different experiences—that enables us to perceive what urges, needs, understanding or values we do actually share despite the differences we’ve got between us on this particular problem.

Marla: How does a moderator ensure that deliberation actually takes place? What are some key strategies?

Keith: One of the things they’d want to make sure of is that each of these different approaches and values behind it is present in that room, so at the first stage everybody sitting in that room is aware of what the differences are and why people hold those differences.

Bob: It has something to do with what we refer to as ‘framing an issue.’ When in politics two parties come to a bargaining table, they come knowing that they want to bargain something, which at its best reaches a compromise on some kind of action. But that’s different from what a moderator is trying to do in a forum. The moderator is trying to encourage people to first look at various value judgments rather than bargaining chips. So we begin very often in a deliberative forum by hearing not much more than people’s stories. What they really are is people revealing why it is that this issue matters to them—why they think it’s serious enough for people to come out and talk about it. If you do that, you’re probably doing well. So, a moderator is presenting what we hope is a fair coverage of what is at stake so people can respond to certain outcomes against other outcomes that have different effects.

Marla: So, can you have deliberation in just a conversation or a discussion or a focus group? Do you find deliberation in those settings? How would you distinguish between those different types of conversations?

Bob: Obviously you can have deliberation in any kind of setting. I sometimes sit by myself and deliberate. But I think we’re always about public deliberation. That means we have not only identified a public issue, but have already identified an issue in which we know different kinds of people are differently affected, so deliberation is the weighing of one approach to a problem against another. It’s about alternative ways of thinking, none of them utterly persuasive perhaps, none of them to be utterly rejected perhaps, because all of them are rooted in a genuine set of human values and purposes. That’s the basis of public deliberation to me.

Keith: A lot of normal exchanges are so shorthanded and particularly about some particular action: ‘What would help improve schools? We should do this or that.’ What we almost always try to do in public deliberative forums is back up the conversation so rather than going right to the actions,[we] get people to move backwards and say, ‘What is the underlying problem that needs to be addressed? And, considering other things that might be done, why do certain people favor that instead of doing this sort of thing?’ So, almost always that’s one of the defining distinctions between a deliberative conversation and the sort of exchanges that take place routinely.

Marla: Some of these projects and communities are bringing in parents who really have very little experience--not only with schools and principals and their children’s teachers--but with public officials. And there has been a certain hesitancy to have these parents fully participate with people in power. I’m wondering what your thoughts are on that.

Keith: That’s a crucial dimension of what moderators are obliged to do, and that is the very premise of these forums—that there’s equality among people that are there. Part of the purpose of the issue book is that there doesn’t need to be people in positions of authority called ‘experts,’ ‘superintendents of education’ or whatever. The very presence of those authority figures discourages and sometimes cancels out the possibility of real deliberation. One of the things a moderator is trying to do is establish equal ground among participants so people don’t get in the position from the very beginning of saying, ‘I’m just a parent, I don’t know anything.’

Bob: One of the functions of public deliberation is to provide—as an outcome—advice that is useful to policy leaders that were not in the deliberation. Our democracy is made up of a lot of institutions, but it’s also made up of a non-institutional public. They don’t always meet together all of the time. Sometimes it’s important to have a public deliberation that doesn’t appeal to a political leader or institutional professional, but may be extremely useful subsequently to that leader or professional. So, when we organize public deliberation, it’s wonderful to say it’s open to all citizens. But we also have to recognize … [that] some subjects just aren’t going to be deliberated effectively if every group is in the room.

Marla: All of these groups [in the project] have a goal of getting to action steps. That’s always the challenge once you sit down and weigh choices and feel these tensions. So, in your mind, where are you now in terms of the relationship between deliberative forums and community action?

Keith: One relationship is that deliberation doesn’t inevitably lead to a clear set of actions. In a local community, I would want to write a headline that said, ‘Local Group Reaches Consensus,’ that the school superintendent should do this, rather than that. But one of things that Bob and I and our colleagues have noticed over the years is that there may or may not be that kind of discernible consensus. People will agree on certain things, they’ll understand certain things and won’t change their minds about certain things. So, it’s a subtle thing to tease out what is the movement that happened in the course of these discussions called deliberations.

Bob: I think this is critically important. And hopefully, people who deliberate more and more come to understand it. And in a sense, an understanding of it makes deliberation more effective practically even though it may not seem to have a practical outcome. If the process of deliberation is going well, then what does happen is the … people in that deliberative meeting tend to grow and that means some of the … impregnable barriers have somehow dropped because they understand each other’s motives and even the base of different motives. Now, what is the relationship of deliberation to action? Obviously, in some instances if that kind of understanding is shared, the forum has produced wiser citizens, who may be much more capable of developing and organizing and defining effective action. On the other hand, it may go further than that. Because as a result of that larger understanding, they may see much more clearly an approach to a problem … a coherent approach that may lead to viable action. There is always the sense that on some topics it is so clear at the end of a forum what we want to do, some of us individually and some of us in little collectives will go forward and make sure something happens because of what we just heard in a forum. It is, as Keith said, important not to assume that if you go to a forum, you’ll have a discussion and come out and do whatever it is you all agreed on, because the truth is, you probably haven’t all agreed.

Keith: One of the ways we know that better sense [of action is present] is this phrase that pops up so often in deliberation about “costs” or “tradeoffs” or “consequences.” Frequently one of the most important outcomes is not that there’s a glowing consensus, but finding a number of people who say, ‘Yes, I realize this is going to have certain costs, certain consequences, and I’m willing to accept those.’ And that’s a very real outcome that tends not to be reported normally. That kind of agreement can be very important to unlock political deadlock.