The Structured Dialogue Method is an approach to facilitating dialogue which aims to produce learning from stories.  That is – robust theory based on solid real-life experience.  The method follows the general principles of a good conversation (participants sit in a circle and the conversation is polite and respectful), it imposes some additional structure.

The key points are:

• having a facilitator who hosts the meeting and suggests when it is time to move on through the stages of the dialogue
• listening to a true 5 minute story (or two stories) told in the first person by the person they happened to and related to a theme the group wants to find out about
• an initial ‘go-round’ to enable participants to ‘clear’ their emotional response to the story by giving a gut reaction immediately after the story has been told
• a set progression of questioning of the story after that (which means the group considers:
  • ‘What’ questions
  • then ‘Why’ questions
  • then ‘So What’ questions
  • and ends up asking ‘Now What’ type questions)
• note-taking all the way through by everyone involved and the recording of insights on post-it notes which are stuck up on an insight wall (or you could use 140 character Tweets instead)
• the organisation of insights into categories (which are used as the main headings in the resulting theory)
• writing a theory which strings together the insights which emerge from the process on the insight wall.

Running a full Structured Dialogue takes several hours – and the people who take part need to be briefed beforehand. Ideally, it takes place over two half days a week or so apart.  It does, however, produce good results – people are actually usually very good at producing learning from experience and the method helps to speed up the process a lot.  In particular, SDM ensures a respectful and co-operative approach and the questioning order pushed by the facilitator (what – then why – then so what – and finalkly now what) makes learning more orderly and easier to engage with.

If the time available is not sufficient to use the whole process, you can use bits from it, including:

• sitting in a circle (the story circle reflects the way people sit around a fire to tell stories and reflect together on their meaning)
• creating space for emotional reactions to things which are said.  Emotional reactions aren’t ‘wrong’ – they should be heard too.  Creating a space for them, enables other useful responses and insights to be shared as well
• using what-why-so what- now what questions in that order. This order reflects ideas about how humans learn: we experience something (can describe what happens); we reflect on it (ask why); we theorise about it (working out ‘so what’ it means); and we test new ways of doing things (asking ‘now what’).  Most people and groups of people, neglect the reflection and testing stages which means we move straight from experience to theory, forming ‘practice theories’ or prejudices.
• the insight wall – encouraging participants in a meeting to use post-it notes to record pithy insights into the subjects under discussion.  As an alternative to a post-it note, you can ask people to use messages on Twitter – ‘tweets’ are 140 characters long, which is roughly what fits comfortably on a post-it note.

If you would like to use the Structured Dialogue method or adapt elements from it for use in your meetings, there is a free guide available and examples of it in use which you can get from the Chamberlain Forum or Google SDM here.