During a restorative dialogue, or when facilitating one, it helps to have a picture in our mind of what it is we wish to talk about, as well as a roadmap of how we might set about it.
The framework we use is inspired by the book ‘Difficult Conversations: How to Discuss What Matters Most’ by Douglas Stone, Bruce Patton and Sheila Heen.
The book describes how a conflict situation can be considered as three stories: My Story, Your Story and the Third Story. The three stories are, in turn, illuminated by four conversations: the What Happened Conversation, the Feelings Conversation, the Identity Conversation and the Learning Conversation. Our framework adopts and adapts the three stories and the four conversations, producing readily useable framework.
The framework is shown graphically below and described in the pages that follow.
