How ‘story’ is important to SST
Living stories are emergent, shape the near now, stretch into the future, loop back in time, branch off and re-emerge in re-tellings. Stories are living.
As a means to conceptualize the single session we have simplified the process into three phases; beginnings, middles, and endings. Each phase directs our attention to specific micro-skills throughout the process. It’s the third phase, the notion of ending, that I want to expand on here. It has perhaps become misleading as the ‘endings’ phrasing conjures notions of completion and a stop or end to the process. This is not what was intended. While the third phase of the conversation is concerned with bringing the conversation to a close, it is more about practices favourable to conversation endurance; that is helping the story-in-the-making live on well past the face-to-face interaction.
In these conversations we are certainly on the lookout for exceptions to the problem, unique outcomes, and initiatives to provide the entry points to difference and possibility. Yet, any single exception or unique outcome is always vulnerable to fading away or becoming overshadowed by problem story after the conversation. Situating within the framework of story, linking a preferred instance to other similar events across time according to a theme, assists the story-in-the-making to be more durable and endure long past the single conversation.
Living Stories
Conversation endurance comes about as stories are ‘living’ in that they continue on into the near now and the future. The story-in-the-making does not end with the conversation. With each re-telling and through recall, stories continue to generate meaning and provide a receiving context for new information. Stories can then also bend back in time, having someone recall an experience they hadn’t thought of previously fitting with the emergent story-in-the-making. This reaching forward, looping and bending backwards across the timeline makes for generative and lasting conversations.
Elements of what’s absent but implicit, found in the plurality of an expression, can lead to new and diverse preferred storylines.These new emergent stories can then too take hold, stretch into the future or bend back into the past as links and connections are made in new and revised ways. The concept of ‘living stories’ reminds us that identity is not fixed but rather becoming, meanings are not static but past meanings can be renegotiated and new meanings can be co-developed.
Conversation Endurance Map
In the third phase of the session, we invite tellings and re-tellings as we ask people to identify those with whom it would be important to share what is emerging. Who would it be important to share this part of the conversation with? How might they respond to hearing about these developments? Audiencing, having people identify appropriate audiences to share with and speculate about their responses and responses to those responses, invites re-tellings and further meaning generation. People live into these growing stories. We describe this process as the ripples or reverberations from the single session.
That said, the third phase does not represent a fixed ending but rather a perch or momentary pause in the ever unfolding tapestry of life. It’s a launching point for stories that continue to shape lives long after the session ends. Sometimes this is the very next day. Sometimes these threads of stories lie dormant, emerging months or years later as compost for future meaning making. It’s the living story that is so favourable to single session, time constrained conversations.