Complexity Science and Collaborative Decision Making

In a recent book entitled Planning with Complexity, Judith Innes and David Booher (2010) make the case for a new way of knowing and deciding that they call collaborative rationality, an approach to problem solving that puts a premium on face-to-face dialogue and multiparty negotiation. Collaborative rationality involves interactions among a great many people with different perspectives, drawing on multiple sources of information, who manage to reach agreement. To explain how such broad-based collaboration is possible, Innes and Booher draw on insights from the field of complexity science.