Interthinking: Thinking Together Why our best thinking often happens in conversation

We often think of thinking as a private activity that happens inside our heads. This overlooks the way dialogue shapes our ideas, even when we appear to be thinking alone. Interthinking helps us see conversation as a shared process through which understanding, insight, and new possibilities can emerge between us.

What is thinking?

Most of us think of thinking as something that happens inside our own heads. We sit quietly, reflect, analyze, weigh up alternatives, and eventually reach a conclusion. Conversation comes afterward. We use it to explain our thinking to other people.

It is such a familiar way of looking at things that we rarely question it.

But what if we have it the wrong way round? What if conversation is not simply a way of communicating our thoughts, but one of the primary ways in which those thoughts are formed?

This simple shift in perspective changes how we think about learning, leadership, collaboration, and, increasingly, our relationship with AI.

Thinking is dialogue

Rupert Wegerif argues that thinking itself is fundamentally dialogic.

Even when we appear to be thinking alone, we are often engaged in an internal conversation. We ask ourselves questions, weigh competing viewpoints, imagine how someone else might respond, challenge our own assumptions, and rehearse possible futures. Thinking is rarely a silent stream of logic. It is a dialogue taking place within us.

This idea builds on the work of Lev Vygotsky, who argued that higher mental processes first develop through our interactions with other people before becoming internalized as inner speech. Wegerif takes this a step further. Dialogue is not simply something that helps thinking. It is the form that thinking itself takes.

Whether the dialogue happens within one person or between several people, thinking remains conversational.

Interthinking

Neil Mercer gave us a useful word for the dialogue that takes place between people: interthinking.

Mercer uses the term to describe the way we think together through conversation. As we question, explain, challenge, and build on one another’s ideas, new understanding emerges that none of us may have reached alone.

His research in schools showed that the quality of children’s conversations directly influenced the quality of their reasoning. Groups that learned to engage in thoughtful dialogue consistently outperformed those whose conversations consisted mainly of assertions, agreements, or arguments.

Mercer’s contribution was important because he demonstrated, through careful research, that thinking together is not simply a pleasant idea. It is a skill that can be learned.

Why conversation changes our thinking

Why does conversation help us think better?

One reason is that we all live within the limits of our own experience. We develop habits of thought, familiar assumptions, and preferred ways of seeing the world. Left entirely to ourselves, we often return to the same conclusions because we are working within the same mental landscape.

Conversation changes that.

Another person notices something we have overlooked. They ask a question we had not thought to ask. They interpret the situation differently. Sometimes they simply misunderstand us, forcing us to explain our thinking more clearly. In doing so, we often discover that we did not fully understand our own ideas until we tried to express them.

Conversation also exposes assumptions. Many of the beliefs that shape our thinking remain invisible until someone else challenges them. We begin to see not only new answers but entirely new questions.

Perhaps most importantly, meaning itself is created through dialogue. Words do not carry fixed meanings that pass neatly from one mind to another. We create meaning together as we listen, respond, question, and interpret one another. If meaning is created conversationally, then thinking, which depends on meaning, is also fundamentally conversational.

Conversation is therefore much more than an exchange of ideas. It is one of the ways new ideas come into being.

A much older tradition

Although the word interthinking is relatively recent, the underlying idea has much deeper roots.

Mikhail Bakhtin argued that meaning is inherently dialogic. David Bohm saw dialogue as a way for groups to think collectively, allowing fresh insight to emerge that no individual could have planned in advance. Martin Buber reminded us that genuine dialogue begins not with techniques but with meeting one another as people.

Each of these thinkers approaches dialogue from a different direction, but together they challenge the image of the isolated thinker. Our thinking is always shaped by conversations, whether they are taking place now, remembered from the past, or imagined in the future.

Conversational Leadership

This understanding of thinking has profound implications for organizations.

Many organizations still assume that knowledge resides within individuals and that the task is simply to capture, document, and distribute it. Meetings become places where people report, persuade, and make decisions.

But if thinking itself is conversational, then conversation is not simply a way of exchanging knowledge. It is where much of our knowledge is created.

Some of the most valuable insights a team produces cannot be separated from the conversations that produced them. They did not exist beforehand. They emerged through dialogue.

This is one of the foundations of Conversational Leadership.

The role of a conversational leader is not simply to improve communication or facilitate meetings. It is to create the conditions in which people can think together, question together, and develop a shared understanding that did not exist before the conversation began.

Thinking with AI

These ideas become even more interesting as AI becomes part of our conversations.

Much of the discussion about AI focuses on information. AI gives us remarkable access to information and extraordinary new ways to search, summarize, analyze, and generate content.

Important though this is, information is only part of the story.

If thinking is dialogue, then AI is beginning to occupy a new role. It is becoming another conversational partner. We can ask it questions, invite it to challenge our assumptions, explore unfamiliar perspectives, and help us think through complex issues.

The important question is therefore not simply whether AI can think.

A more interesting question is whether we can learn to think with AI.

A different view of conversation

Interthinking invites us to rethink conversation itself.

Conversation is not simply a vehicle for exchanging ideas that already exist. It is one of the primary ways in which new ideas are created. Our best thinking often emerges not because one person has the answer, but because several people are willing to explore a question together.

Once we recognize this, conversation no longer appears to be something that happens around the work.

Very often, it is the work.