By itself, voting is naturally more quantitative than qualitative. Furthermore, majoritarian approaches tend to be divisive, oversimplifying complexity and motivating and rewarding victories over minorities. In pursuit of this win-lose logic, majorities often ignore minorities (and complexity) as much as possible in their decision-making, thus reducing our overall collective wisdom by excluding minority insights and energies, as well as evoking resistance from those who are ignored.
To the extent an approach helps us step back from that win-lose game to engage our full diversity in creative ways to call forth greater shared understanding, it tends to avoid this problem and to generate greater collective wisdom. And so, for the purposes of furthering wiser forms of democracy, I particularly advocate approaches that creatively use the complementary dynamics of divergence and convergence – of diversity and common ground – to discover deeper, broader, more life-serving understandings and possibilities.
Learning Change 