"Sometimes it’s said that we need cultural change in organisations or even communities. Stories don’t just reflect the culture: they ARE the culture. If you want to change culture, you need to change the stories and the way people tell them."
Last week the Chamberlain Forum delivered a seminar outlining the Structured Dialogue Method and its use in Birmingham City Council's Asset Transfer Scheme. It was interesting to see the emphasis placed on stories in a new context, and the method definitely opens up consultation, decision making and evaluation to people who might not normally have access. These are some reflections I had during and after the seminar:
• It seems to encourage a 360-degree view of a given topic, by providing a ‘safe space’ in which power hierarchies are symbolically flattened and each participant given the same opportunity, and obligation, to speak and listen
• Encourages active listening, in which story-tellers are not only allowed to speak and be heard, but are immediately given feedback and critical engagement
• It seems to be used primarily so that individuals can tell their stories of things that have already happened. I wonder if we could tell stories about what we want to happen, about an imagined experience and instead of saying ‘why did this happen?’ ask ‘how can we make this happen?’ as the very first stage of a project or piece of research.
• I wonder if the story-telling format limits certain experiences in some way. It can impose a structure of chronology, cause and effect and logic on an experience. Can SDM accommodate more abstract, conceptual or experimental forms of storytelling that allow the speaker to move beyond the what-where-why structure to expose feelings, ideas and theories that fall outside the bounds of traditional Western storytelling?
• It presupposes that people arrive with a story fully formed – one with a neat beginning and end. This doesn’t take into account the context of delivery or the effect of the responses of others. Stories evolve as they are told and heard, so I wonder if this kind of instant retelling and response might miss some of the complexity of the storytelling process.
• Encourages an instrumental approach to stories and experience, treating them as data to be dissected which might not be appropriate for some subjects.
Post new comment