Narrative Ecology – Blog of Ron Donaldson – fACILITATOR, TRAINER AND COACH

I thought that I would use the run up to Christmas to reflect on my last 27 years as a knowledge, then narrative, ecologist, sharing insights and explaining a few of my guiding principles, tools and techniques.

I have taken the opportunity to simplify my blog which surprised me in revealing that I have published more than 450 posts since I began blogging in February 2008.

[Photo taken on Whitby East Shore in 2025. My favourite place to be. A truly liminal zone, at this moment being between low and high tide, between day and night as the sun sets and between land and sea]

I have been very lucky in my opportunities and choices which began back in 1998 when I first met Dave Snowden and I was rescued from a life of systems analysis, IT and order and drawn into the wonderful worlds of knowledge, complexity and storytelling.

English Nature was incredibly supportive and allowed me to explore all manner of adjacent possibles from oral history, video capture and editing of conferences, retirement knowledge capture, problem solving, strategy forming, learning of lessons, mergers, team building, the list goes on and on.

Knowledge management opened up an incredible variety of similar thinking people (you know who you are), conference speaking (which I loved) and the chance to run workshops at home and abroad. I joined Ron Young and Knowledge Associates for a while which gave me the great opportunity to work with Friends of the Earth, learning lessons from their Bee Campaign.

Tony Quinlan (Narrate) and Dave S in 2008, as I left English Nature, pulled me into the serious side with the first ever Sensemaker implementations, Anecdote Circles galore and a deep immersion into cynefin.

While teaching cynefin for Cognitive Edge I met Alan Drummond who took me on as a problem solver/ facilitator in Argenta, teaching and facilitating Innovation Boosters to some of the cleverest engineers across Europe. We also had a successful FP7 European Project under our belt.

A chance encounter with Karen Gadd in 2009 led to me being an integral part of the Oxford Creativity Team teaching and facilitating TRIZ across Europe and the USA.

Similar chance opportunities have widened my experience and connections further in such areas as Systemic Constellations, Bardic Storytelling and I was proud to be a founder of the Participatory Narrative Inquiry Institute with Cythia Kurtz who has greatly influenced and inspired my PNI-based approach.

I plan to pick over several of the above experiences, tools and techniques in the next 12 Christmas posts and we will see where I get to on Christmas Eve.

My approach will be playful but with very serious insights, principles and tips and will be based around the adjacent possibility that Fireman Sam, just like me back in 2008 decides to take an exploratory step into the complex world of workshop facilitation. A shift from Fireman Sam to Narrative Ecologist Sam. I can also promise no use of AI for the forthcoming series of posts.

Post 1 planned for 1st December. Post 12 for 24th December 2025