Facilitating Shared Understanding in an Age of Disagreement: A Free DRH–NCDD Training on Sensemaking

The Dialogue and Deliberation Resources Hub and NCDD are offering a timely new training, Facilitating Shared Sensemaking in Complexity, focused on helping communities navigate decision-making when facts are contested and trust is fragile. Featuring practitioners from National Issues Forums Institute, the Federation for Innovation in Democracy, News Ambassadors, and Diapraxis, the session explores how dialogue, deliberation, and collective learning can be integrated to move groups from adversarial debate toward shared understanding. Participants will examine practical approaches to balancing expert knowledge with lived experience, designing transparent and inclusive processes, and supporting groups to reach “true enough” common ground for collective action amid uncertainty. For practitioners facing stalled conversations, polarized narratives, and information distrust, the training offers concrete strategies for facilitating learning together when complexity and disagreement are unavoidable.

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How do communities make decisions when basic facts are disputed? When expert knowledge conflicts with lived experience? When people arrive at the table with fundamentally different understandings of what's true? These questions sit at the heart of democratic practice in an era of information fragmentation, eroding institutional trust, and deepening epistemic divides. A new training from the Dialogue and Deliberation Resources Hub and NCDD explores practical approaches to this urgent challenge.
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The upcoming session, Facilitating Shared Sensemaking in Complexity, brings together practitioners working at the intersection of dialogue, deliberation, and collective learning. Cristin Brawner from National Issues Forums Institute, Marjan Ehsassi from the Federation for Innovation in Democracy, Shia Levitt from News Ambassadors, and Rosa Zubizarreta-Ada from Diapraxis will share diverse methods for helping groups develop shared understanding even when facts feel contested and perspectives seem irreconcilable.

From Debate to Collective Learning

The training addresses a fundamental tension in civic engagement work: how do we create space for community knowledge and lived experience while also drawing appropriately on expert input? How do we help groups weigh evidence and question assumptions without privileging certain voices or ways of knowing over others? The speakers will explore how thoughtful issue framing, skillful facilitation, and transparent process design can shift groups from debating to win toward learning together—developing what facilitators often call common ground on what's true enough to act on together.

This approach draws on lessons from multiple traditions: dialogue's emphasis on deep listening and relationship-building, citizens' assemblies' structured methods for integrating expert testimony with deliberative judgment, and public deliberation's attention to how groups make collective decisions under conditions of uncertainty. For NCDD practitioners, the session offers practical strategies for navigating some of the field's most persistent challenges—supporting groups to move beyond fixed narratives, integrating expertise without sidelining community wisdom, translating relational facilitation skills into collective judgment and action, and knowing when different approaches are most appropriate for different contexts. The pre-training survey itself reveals the complexity practitioners face: conversations that stall or fragment, information that groups distrust, processes that struggle to hold uncertainty and disagreement while still moving toward shared understanding and action.
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Curious about how to facilitate shared sensemaking when facts are contested and perspectives diverge? Register for the DRH-NCDD training and share your questions through the pre-training survey at https://learndemocracy.online