Back in June 2001 I was working in English Nature and for two years had been pursuing as many opportunities to engage with storytelling in all its forms. In those days it was necessary to support everything you did with numerical targets. So , in the strong context that this was a proposal in the quickly emerging field of knowledge management, this is what I proposed to senior managent and it was accepted as an 18 month project which I managed to keep going a full 7 years until I left in 2008.
KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT INITIATIVE 2001
My vision of what we could achieve if successful:
English Nature regarded as a major player in Knowledge Management
Our key messages influencing Industry and businesses throughout the world especially FTSE 100
4 papers published telling our story in prestigious K M publications
Presentations at 10 major conferences telling of our story and experiences
7 more NNR ‘sands of time’ published
14 local teams visited to deliver a package that would include:
- Presentation based on our story
- Story telling workshop
- Science network analysis
- NNR ‘sands of time’ blueprint
A knowledge map of our communities and knowledge assets
Involvement in Dave Snowden/Ch 4 Television programme on Story telling
A story bank on the Intranet/Internet to be used by all staff for learning, teaching and publicity
Involvement of local Peterborough ethnic communities on story telling
Indirect effects such as:
- Improved learning, succession, apprenticeship, communication and Knowledge management throughout English Nature.
- Attraction of more sponsorship for publications and events
- Stronger links with local communities
- Greater promotion of English Nature and its key issues/messages
- Promotion of NNR network
- Greater staff loyalty, pride, enthusiasm, respect
- Discover greater knowledge about our reserves
Ron Donaldson, IDT 20th June 2001
As you can imagine, not everything above happened as planned, I had completely forgotten about the proposed Dave Snowden TV programme, but I gave them my best shot and several of the above ‘experiments’ did generate desirable shifts and gave me, as I used to regularly say at conferences, “the best job in the world”.
Narrative Ecology - Blog of Ron Donaldson - fACILITATOR, TRAINER AND COACH 
Leave a comment