From Wisdom Circles to Civic Wisdom

As we all know, many of us today feel politically homeless. Some have withdrawn from public life altogether, convinced that their voices no longer matter. Others remain engaged but feel overwhelmed by the complexity of modern life. We are asked to vote on issues that affect millions of people, yet we are rarely given opportunities to reflect deeply on them with people we trust. In essence, our democracy appears to be missing a crucial layer: a process for collective sense-making that sits between individual voting and governmental decision-making.

While modern democracies excel at collecting individual opinions, they provide remarkably few opportunities for citizens to engage in thoughtful inquiry together before forming those opinions. As a result, many political decisions emerge from fragmentation rather than relationship. What do I mean by relationship?

For the past several years, I have been exploring a simple observation that small circles of trusted others offer a different possibility. Within groups of three to seven people, individuals can arrive at understandings that none of them could reach alone. In such spaces, wisdom becomes an experience of learning to see together.

What I have found is that once groups grow beyond seven, relationships tend to become more abstract and coordination more difficult.1 Yet in circles of three to seven people, something different becomes possible. People can genuinely know one another. They can disagree without becoming enemies. They can repair misunderstandings. They can develop enough trust to engage complexity without immediately collapsing into certainty.

In my community, Wisdom Exchange, we refer to these groups as “small, interconnected islands of coherence.” Now I find myself wondering: “What if these groups could become part of the democratic process?”

Imagine thousands of small circles gathering regularly to explore the issues affecting their communities. Rather than casting isolated votes, participants would engage in collaborative inquiry. They would listen, question, challenge assumptions, and seek to understand perspectives different from their own. The goal would no longer be consensus at any cost. Instead, it would be coherence.2 Over time, each circle could develop a collective vote that reflects the quality of their members’ shared discernment. These votes could then be woven into larger civic systems.

Recent developments in civic technology make this possibility especially intriguing. Practitioners of distributed democracy, such as Audrey Tang, have demonstrated how AI can help identify areas of agreement hidden beneath polarization. Rather than amplifying conflict, as so much of our online discourse does, civic AI can reveal patterns of collective intelligence. It can surface shared concerns, common priorities, and opportunities for cooperation that might otherwise remain invisible in everyday conversations.

Now imagine combining civic AI with thousands of wisdom circles. Instead of millions of disconnected opinions flowing into the political system, the input would come from groups that have already engaged in the hard work of building relational trust and collaborative sense-making. The AI would then help weave together the judgments emerging from countless local circles. The result would resemble a living nervous system more than a voting machine — a network of communities sensing into what is needed and communicating that information to the larger whole of society.

Of course, realizing such a vision depends upon capacities that are currently underdeveloped.

First, we must find our trusted others, and by “trusted” I do not mean people who think exactly as we do, but people with whom we can remain in relationship when we disagree. Trust is confidence that a relationship can survive difference.

Second, we must cultivate practices of sense-making that actually make sense. Many conversations today have become little more than competing performances. Genuine sense-making requires a willingness to allow reality to challenge our assumptions. In other words, it asks us to move beyond certainty and become students of complexity.

Third, we must learn to listen for something larger than our personal preferences. In Gestalt Practice, we speak of “the field.” By field, I mean the larger web of influences that includes what is happening within us as individuals as well as what is happening between and among us collectively. It is the wider context from which new possibilities emerge. The question before us then becomes: “What is the field asking of us?” Not merely, “What do I want?” Nor even, “What does my group want?” But rather, “What is being asked of us in this context, at this time?”

As thousands of circles begin inquiring into that question together, I imagine something remarkable could happen. Politics could become less about accumulating power and more about coordinating wisdom. And wisdom — the capacity to discern how best to respond to what this moment is asking of us — is probably the single most important capacity what we need more of if we hope to address the metacrisis.3

Perhaps the next civic revolution begins when a handful of people sit together in a circle and discover that their shared attention can perceive what none of them could see alone. With the help of wisely designed civic AI, those countless acts of collective attention could then be woven together into a new form of governance, one capable of sensing where the collective wishes to go. Rather than outrage or domination, such a society would be organized around our shared capacity for wisdom and belonging.

What a wonderful world that would be.