Narrative Ecology – Blog of Ron Donaldson – fACILITATOR & TRAINER

I am super excited to have finished and published this my first Narrative Inquiry report.

My complex facilitator training (thanks Dave Snowden) normally makes me super sensitive to engaging in the content of a workshop or the idea of a consultant that compiles their own lessons or recommendations as a report.

This is my first experiment at using ChatGPT as a proxy for ‘Participatory’ ie all the poor people who have had their knowledge sucked out and allows ChatGPT to answer as if it understands all the legal, commercial, governance aspects of a system. I know it would work better with real live people but I could not get them all together.

To cut a long story short a large area (5ha) of the fields out the back of our house has been fenced off in the name of pupil security for the local Academy. I don’t think the process was fair in its consideration of Biodiversity and/or community access and unbelievably, I said this more than a year before the March 2026 decision, in my objection. See Page 24 to read it in its entirety, so I therefore researched and compiled this report.

I had to cross the fields a few weeks ago to go to the Chemist and took my usual route across the fields, the exact same route my wife and I took to find our house the day we bought it, more than 39 years ago. Without exaggeration the sadness that overwhelmed me when I saw these horrible nature unfriendly panels being secured to block my path, must have been exactly what John Clare experienced just a few miles from here when he saw the beginning of the effects of the Inclosure Act of 1773. 5ha is huge, 50000 square metres, enough space for 7 Wembley sized football pitches, taken from us just like that.

The Report structure is purposefully fragmented in the same way as things that happened are added to hexagons in one of my workshops. Each piece, there are 20 in all, being a conversation with ChatGPT. The hope is that each piece might generate a new insight (an unexpected shift to a new story) and gradually you, the reader, will have made enough sense of the situation by the end to start to think about what might be done to improve matters.

It’s just gone live and freely available so if you know of anyone who might be interested in reading it, please let me know.

The PDF and Executive Summary can be accessed here:

Publications

I am now looking for opportunities (adjacent possibles) to present or facilitate workshops around this so DEFRA, Natural England and lots of other bodies are on my hitlist.