Public deliberation can have a variety of purposes:

• Citizens and public bodies bring diverse groups of people together in town meetings for community problem solving at the neighborhood, city, county, state, or national level.
• Classroom teachers use public deliberation to engage their students in politics, to experience being a member of a deliberating citizenry, and to better understand participatory government.
• Organizations and institutions use public deliberation as a catalyst in the community, devising better ways to carry out their mission and
• become partners in improving the common good.

In our daily lives, we constantly hear people debate right and wrong, weighing their side against the other at PTA meetings, city council sessions, demonstrations, public hearings, and in political campaigns. On the radio and TV we hear combatants bitterly opposed over issues, each concerned about winning and proving the other side wrong. Dialogue is not debate. It is a structured process of face-to-face exchange for making decisions that lead to actions. Deliberation is dialogue based on the premise that many people have pieces of the answer and that together they forge new approaches and solutions. It asks people to put aside their own interests and hear what others feel and think. It is this distinct process of making decisions based on many and varied positions that allows citizens to act together (Mathews & McAfee, 1997).

In "On Dialogue, Culture, and Organizational Learning," Edgar H. Schein discusses whether debate is more or less desirable than dialogue. He argues that debate "is a valid problem-solving and decision-making process only if one can assume that the group members understand each other well enough to be talking the same language" (1993, p. 47). One danger in group discussion is that groups may reach what he calls a "false consensus." People may think they mean the same thing only to find out later that they misunderstood each other. They discover that subtle differences in meaning have major consequences. He suggests dialogue be used as a basic process for building understanding. "By letting disagreement go, meanings become clearer and the group gradually builds a shared set of meanings that make much higher levels of mutual understanding and creative thinking possible" (1993, p. 47).

According to the authors of The Unfinished Journey: Restructuring Schools in a Diverse Society (Olsen et al., 1994), many schools found discussing race and the differential treatment of racial and cultural minorities painfully difficult. A lack of common language also made dialogue difficult in these schools. "It's not just finding the words, it's finding out whether we mean the same thing by the words we use. It's how people perceive and define issues" (Olsen et al., 1994, p. 35). The words one person uses to express important beliefs can make others uncomfortable and angry. One individual may call passionately for building a common ground, while another hears that as a desire to diminish the richness of cultural diversity. Taking time to build trust and finding ways to articulate basic assumptions is key to deliberation (Olsen et al., 1994).