The LEAF Method

Overview

The LEAF method is an approach to engagement grounded in responsiveness and reflection.

The method moves through a cycle of four stages:

Listening
Emergence
Action
Feedback

Through these stages, the cycle asks its users to listen responsively to other people, attend to what emerges, take action to make sense of what they have heard, and feed back their perspective to enhance collective understanding.

This method can be enacted in both the short and long term – whether at the scale of an individual conversation, or the creation of a work of art.

Roots

The LEAF method was developed during Finding the Story Arc’s first phase, as researcher Milo Harries (MH) reflected on past engagement activities conducted by Stephen Scott-Bottoms (SSB), the project lead.

During his analysis, MH noted two key coexisting trends in SSB's earlier work: a strong orientation towards interdisciplinary dialogue, and the nonetheless consistent presence of convictions and capabilities that are characteristic of theatre practice and research.

On the basis of this analysis, SSB and MH developed a method that honours this combination of theatre thinking and cross-sector collaboration. In doing so, they sought to offer a theatre-grounded complement to other approaches to listening, learning, and reflection – including Donald Schön’s Reflective Practice, David Kolb’s Experiential Learning Cycle, and Judi Brownell’s HURIER model of listening.

What came out of these efforts is the four-stage cycle that SSB and MH now call LEAF: an iterative approach to engagement that deploys skills that are characteristic of the theatre in contexts that extend far beyond it.

The LEAF Cycle

Listening

The LEAF cycle begins with attentive listening, allowing people to express their experience in their own words and on their own terms. This receptive attention to others is the core of the method, favouring responsive curiosity over pre-ordained objectives. The ambition is to cultivate a listening that is open to the unexpected and capable of surprise. (Note 1)

In practice, this listening can take a range of different forms, at a number of different scales. For example, it might be the core of an individual interview, with the interviewer encouraging their conversation partner to respond openly and in their own terms to a question or prompt. Alternatively, a listening phase might more broadly describe an entire series of interviews, in which a process of attentive listening generates material for a work of art. Here, listening is taken to indicate a longer-term process, but one that still centres the same principles of discovery and response.

Emergence

In the second phase, the listener attends to what emerges from this process of listening, identifying patterns and connections in what they have heard. Again, the listener should seek to be sensitive to context and curious in their response, resisting as far as possible predetermined expectations or frames. In this phase, the listener begins to respond, allowing the form of their response to be provoked and guided by the form and content of their listening. (Note 2)

Again, this process can occur in a range of contexts. In an interview, it might describe the thought process whereby the interviewer begins to detect patterns in their partner’s thinking, drawing connections between ideas or listening for convictions, assumptions, or gaps. In the longer term, this phase might be where an artist ‘finds the story arc’, beginning to make sense of disparate narrative strands and hearing resonances between them.

Action

The listener then takes action, pulling these emergent ideas together to help them be better understood. Reflecting on what they have heard, the listener articulates their perspective on what has been discussed, aiming to create a new direction from which to approach the discussion. In basic terms, this is where the listener starts to become a speaker, in the hope that their input might clarify the situation, provoke new insights, or add context that had previously gone unnoticed.

This action phase shares the fractal quality of the cycle as a whole, displaying similar properties at different scales. In an interview or group conversation, for instance, this might mark the moment where the listener prepares to speak, crystallising the content of their intervention. In a creative process, meanwhile, action might mean writing a script or making a film – giving new form to the emergent ideas of the previous phase. At whatever scale, though, action represents a moment of decision and a claiming of responsibility – a clarity and conviction that this insight or provocation is what is salient or necessary at this moment in time.

Feedback

Finally, the listener feeds back their perspective, attempting to expand the scope of the conversation. Having reflected on what has been discussed, that is, the listener now reflects back their understanding, in the hope that this new perspective will advance the conversation. Inviting feedback on this contribution, finally, the listener anticipates a new phase of listening, with which the cycle begins again. (Note 3)

In practice, this phase represents the conclusion of a reflective back-and-forth – as well as a prompt to continue that process of reciprocal exchange. In an individual conversation, it might create an inflection point via a comment or a question – drawing attention to something that has gone unacknowledged, or reframing the terms of the discussion. In a creative process, it might manifest as a performance or screening, offering something to an audience that they can respond to as they please.

Notes

1) See Stephen Bottoms and Lindsey McEwen, Multi-Story Water: Sited Performance in Urban River Communities (Arts and Humanities Research Council, 2014), p. 25; Andrew Dobson, Listening for Democracy: Recognition, Representation, Reconciliation (Oxford University Press, 2014), p. 108; Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, 2nd rev. edn., rev. trans. by J Weinsheimer and D.G. Marshall (Sheed and Ward, 1989), p. 383

2) See Stephen Scott-Bottoms and Maggie Roe, ‘Who is a hydrocitizen? The use of dialogic arts methods as a research tool with water professionals in West Yorkshire, UK’, Local Environment 25:4 (2020), p. 279; adrienne maree brown, emergent strategy: shaping change, changing worlds (AK Press, 2017), pp. 5-9.

3) See Stephen Scott-Bottoms, ‘The Agency of Environment: Artificial Hells and Multi-Story Water’, in Performance and Participation: Practices, Audiences, Politics, ed. by Anna Harpin and Helen Nicholson (Bloomsbury, 2016), p. 186; Jacques Rancière, The Ignorant Schoolmaster: Five Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation, trans. Kristin Ross (Stanford UP, 1991 [1987]), p. 18.