I just discovered a wonderful proverb, said to be from west Africa:

If you give me an egg and I give you an egg, we each have one egg.

If you give me an idea and I give you an idea, we each have two ideas.

Of course sharing ideas is central to what slow thinking is about. And if we add to the wisdom of the proverb an understanding of generative dialogue, then we could perhaps say:

If you give me an idea and I give you an idea and we explore our ideas together, we may improve our ideas and discover several new ones along the way.

Ok, so I am unlikely to get a job as a crafter of pithy proverbs, but you get the idea. Slow thinking is at least about sharing ideas, but the energy comes from the interaction and enough time to explore. Our experience each time is that surprising and creative new lines of thinking emerge from the conversation after six or seven people have shared quite separate starting ideas.

The fact that each person is given enough space to introduce a topic, that the setting provides time and mutuality, that the atmosphere is one of mutual respect, listening and exploration – all adds up to stimulating new thinking. It is not a matter of finding common ground nor of competing or contesting – simply exploring together.

As Donna Karlin comments over at her blog:

Putting everything in relevant relation to what you already think and know without being open to the possibilities that there’s more, is a dialogue of the deaf. Talking openly means being willing to expose to others what is within of us. Listening openly means being willing to expose ourselves to something new from others.

I discovered a helpful summary of the dialogue process (drawing on well known work by William Isaacs and others) on a wiki by Paul Caswell. He reminds us that the word dialogue has a root meaning suggestive of entering a “flow of meaning”, and contrasts that with debate. He summarises the practice and process of dialogue:

Practices:

• Listen to others. Follow their line of thinking, feel what they feel
• Suspend your certainties. Take a step back, allow yourself to think about both sides of contradictions
• Respect opposing views. Redirect the force behind them.
• Voice your opinion. Dig deep to find what you have say.

Process:

• We have to break out of the initial polite phase to raise conflicts
• The conflict phase has to move from debate into self reflection (don’t retreat!)
• Self awareness, controlling egos leads to Generative Inquiry
• then the magic begins, the meaning starts flowing; we are in Generative Dialogue
• oh yeah and then we have to return back to the world as such

Steven Johnson, in his stimulating book, Emergence, offers a quote by the futurist, Ray Kurzweil to emphasis the importance of pattern formation and recognition.

Because each individual neuron is so slow, [Ray] Kurzweil explains, “we don’t have time to think too many new thoughts when we are pressed to make a decision. The human brain relies on precomputing its analyses and storing them for future reference. We then use our pattern-recognition capability to recognize a situation as compatible to one we have thought about and then draw upon our previously considered conclusions.”

I have offered some reflections on this quote in relation to slow thinking (and prejudice) on my blog, here.