community
Twenty Five years ago, back in 2001, I was asked to write an article for a Knowledge Management Magazine introducing myself and my interests in a regular article called In the Spotlight.
What follows is the article as I submitted it followed by a reflection in hindsight of its contents.
[For context I had worked as a computer programmer/systems analyst for the previous 18 years. This was completely new to me but I was willing to give up everything to have a go.]
In the Spotlight
Naturally occurring Communities, natural storytelling.
Ron Donaldson has worked for English Nature (the Government agency that champions the conservation of wildlife and geology throughout England) for more than 15 years and is about to have a break from a career in IT to pursue a belief in the greater importance of communities and their stories.
How did this interest develop?
A chance encounter 3 years ago with Dave Snowden (now Director of the Institute of Knowledge management, IBM) followed by a series of innovative consultancy sessions gradually reeled me in to this fascinating and absorbing subject area which I regularly “top up” with one of his highly rated storytelling or innovation masterclasses.
A last-minute invite to explain our approach at a business conference in the Palace of Versailles, of all places, showed how even a complete amateur like me could build a presentation based on the Snowden ‘fable template’ and utilise the amazing powers of storytelling for which I was left totally unprepared for the subsequent interest and enquiries I received.
I particularly like the bringing together of so many different disciplines be it Sociology, Anthropology, Psychology, History, English literature, Philosophy and the subject of my degree, Ecology.
Explain the broad theory
Approximately 80% of what an organisation like English Nature knows is stored in staff brains, not written down or digitised. If we are therefore hoping to manage knowledge we need to better understand how knowledge is transferred from brain to brain and what are the optimum conditions to facilitate this.
I often sit in our work canteen, with a coffee, and imagine that I can see the valuable knowledge assets we have, such as expertise in woodland and skills in land management being transferred between the staff twice a day.
I feel like the dedicated naturalist sitting quietly and unobtrusively watching a badger sett while trying to understand the dynamics, aspects of behaviour and the conditions essential for survival in order to make notes on the natural history of the community.
This is just one of the many naturally occurring communities (smokers at the back door being my other favourite) which I hope to compare and contrast against our more formally created communities of experts, in an effort to improve knowledge flow both within and out with English Nature.
Where does storytelling feature in all this?
Stories are a phenomenally rich and yet relatively untapped resource in most organisations. Of their many aspects I can highlight 3 different but important features of using ‘story’:
– Stories can usefully be used to reveal what knowledge we use and where it can be found.
– Stories help develop a common culture in a community and improve working relationships resulting in greater trust and therefore increased knowledge sharing.
– Most interestingly stories may reveal patterns in the narrative which give useful signposts to where we can concentrate our effort if we are to have a hope of managing knowledge in the future.
An example of this third aspect showed itself in a decaying oral history collection I recently re-discovered. In it a number of our conservation staff told their stories and revealed a remarkably consistent series of patterns such as:
“an early introduction to the countryside by a parent or grandparent”,
“Teachers and lecturers who encouraged a long term interest in nature”,
“an apprenticeship to an inspiring ecologist who passed on their knowledge with enthusiasm”.
This, in itself, suggests to me three relatively untapped areas of intervention for English Nature (and society in general) in order to ensure a sustainable culture of interest in the environment and a source of new committed conservation staff in the future ie early years, school curriculum and conservation staff visiting schools, leading walks and talks with the public.
What do you plan to do next?
I am about to begin a 12–18-month research project
“to better understand knowledge, communities and story in English Nature”.
This will involve:
– observing and analysing communities,
– identifying and cataloguing knowledge assets,
– recording and collecting stories and
– encouraging a knowledge sharing culture.
My success criterion is that I will be able to demonstrate my growing belief that there are greater sustainable benefits in this more natural, human aspect of knowledge management than that of our current obsession with all thing’s technology.
So that is the emic, my perspective back in 2001 of what I was doing and what I was about to embark upon. What follows is the etic view, aided and abetted by ChatGPT as a reflection back, in hindsight with the knowledge I now have of what happened and how important I think some of those ideas have become.
Field observation
This note records something rather more significant than an emerging interest in knowledge management. At first reading, the subject appears to be concerned with a fairly conventional organisational problem: how to prevent valuable knowledge from being lost and how to improve its movement around an organisation. But the observer’s language gives away something else.
He does not describe colleagues as a database, a knowledge repository or even primarily as an organisational resource. He describes them as a community. He watches them in much the same way that an ecologist might watch a natural population. The canteen becomes an observation point. The smokers at the back door become a naturally occurring community. The badger sett becomes a metaphor for understanding social behaviour and knowledge becomes something that moves through this ecology.
This is an important early clue. The emerging subject is not really knowledge management. It is the ecology of knowledge.
The first significant pattern
The most revealing sentence may be the assertion that approximately 80% of organisational knowledge resides in people’s brains rather than in formal systems.
Whether or not the precise percentage withstands scrutiny is almost secondary. What matters is the question it provokes:
If knowledge lives in people, what are the conditions under which it moves between people? That is an ecological question.
It directs attention away from the artefact — the document, database or information system — and towards the relationships, behaviours, contexts and conditions surrounding the knowledge.
The metaphor of knowledge assets passing across the canteen is therefore more than an amusing image. It is an early systems model. Knowledge is not stationary. It flows and the task is not necessarily to capture all of it, but to understand where, when and why the flow occurs.
The naturalist’s gaze
There is another important observation hidden in the badger analogy. The field naturalist does not normally begin by imposing a solution upon the animal. They watch. They look for patterns. They notice interactions. They ask what conditions appear necessary for particular behaviours. They compare what happens in different circumstances. The same observational stance is being transferred here from ecology to human organisation.
This is perhaps the earliest visible expression of what would later become a characteristic feature of your approach: sensemaking before intervention. Rather than asking: What knowledge-management system should we introduce?
the question becomes: What is actually happening here? And then: What patterns can we see? And finally: Where might a small intervention change the conditions for the system to behave differently?
That sequence is now recognisable across much of your subsequent work.
Story is not the product
The three purposes assigned to story are particularly revealing.
Stories:
- reveal where knowledge exists;
- create shared culture and trust;
- expose patterns.
The first two are relatively familiar applications of storytelling. The third is the breakthrough. Here, story ceases to be primarily a communication device and becomes an instrument of inquiry. You are not interested simply in telling better stories. You are interested in listening to many stories and looking across them.
The individual story becomes a field observation. The collection becomes a dataset. The recurring motifs become patterns and the patterns become pointers towards possible intervention. That is very close to the logic that later underpins your use of narrative as a sensemaking mechanism.
The oral-history discovery
The conservation-staff stories provide perhaps the clearest evidence of this emerging method. You noticed recurring pathways:
- a parent or grandparent introducing someone to the countryside;
- a teacher or lecturer nurturing an interest;
- an inspiring ecologist passing knowledge to an apprentice.
The important discovery was not any one story. It was the pattern across stories and once the pattern became visible, a new question emerged: Could these apparently accidental experiences be deliberately cultivated? This is an important transition from observation to intervention.
Rather than saying: These are interesting stories about how conservationists became conservationists. you effectively asked: What does this pattern tell us about the conditions that reproduce a conservation culture? That is a much more powerful question. It moves from biography towards system design.
Pointers towards the later Ron Donaldson
With hindsight, several strands of the later work are already visible.
1. The ecologist never really left
The subject of the degree was ecology but ecology gradually became more than a professional subject. It became a way of seeing.
You began applying ecological habits of observation to communities, organisations, knowledge and eventually to wider social systems. That makes the later term Narrative Ecologist feel less like a new identity and more like an accurate description of what had been happening for years. You were studying human systems using something close to an ecologist’s gaze.
2. Communities became the unit of observation
The contrast between the formally created communities of experts and the naturally occurring communities of the canteen or smoking area is remarkably prescient.
It anticipates a recurring question in your later work: Where does the real system exist — in the organisation chart, or in the relationships between people?
This distinction has become increasingly important in your work with communities, organisations and complex problems. You appear increasingly interested in the spaces between the formal structures. That is where informal knowledge, trust, identity, experience and narrative often reside.
2. The outsider became an advantage
The phrase “complete amateur like me” is also worth preserving. At the time it is presented almost apologetically. In retrospect, it looks like an asset. You were sufficiently outside the established knowledge-management discipline to see something its specialists might easily overlook. Your ecological background allowed you to ask different questions.
Your later use of TRIZ, Cynefin, narrative and participatory approaches continues this pattern. You repeatedly seem to operate between disciplines rather than inside one. That is not intellectual untidiness. It is increasingly central to the value of the approach.
3. The bridge between story and innovation
The encounter with Dave Snowden appears here as an important catalyst but the deeper significance may be that storytelling gave you a way of connecting human experience with organisational innovation. That connection subsequently becomes much stronger. Story provides the raw material. Sensemaking identifies patterns. TRIZ challenges assumptions and contradictions. Cynefin provides a way of thinking about the nature of the system. Participation brings multiple perspectives into the room. The result is not simply a story. it is a capacity to see differently.
4. The beginnings of Participatory Narrative Inquiry
The article does not yet use the language of Participatory Narrative Inquiry but the underlying logic is already recognisable:
people tell stories → stories are compared → patterns emerge → patterns inform collective understanding → understanding enables action.
That is a considerable distance from conventional organisational knowledge capture. The people who possess the knowledge are not merely sources from which information is extracted. They are participants in making sense of their own system. That distinction becomes increasingly important in your later work.
What appears to have succeeded
The strongest evidence of success is not that the original research proposal was completed exactly as envisaged. It is that the questions survived. Indeed, they seem to have become more ambitious.
The original question was essentially:
How can English Nature better understand knowledge, communities and story?
The later questions become closer to:
– How do communities make sense of complex situations?
– How can apparently disconnected knowledge be brought into relationship?
– How can narrative reveal things that conventional analysis misses?
– How can people participate in changing the systems of which they are themselves a part?
– And increasingly: How can we make better decisions in complex environments by paying attention to the knowledge, stories and relationships already present in the system?
That is quite a journey.
A particularly interesting pointer to the present
The article ends with a contrast: “the greater sustainable benefits in this more natural, human aspect of knowledge management than that of our current obsession with all things technology.” There is an almost prophetic quality to that conclusion.
Today, technology is vastly more capable than it was when this was written. AI can capture, classify, search and summarise enormous quantities of information but that makes the original insight more—not less—important.
Technology can increasingly answer: “What information do we have?”
It is much less straightforward to answer:
– “What knowledge matters here?”
– “Whose experience has been overlooked?”
– “Why do people interpret this situation differently?”
– “What stories are circulating?”
– “What relationships enable knowledge to move?” and:
– “What should we do when the system itself is changing?”
Those remain profoundly human and ecological questions.
The field-note conclusion
Looking back at this document, I would not describe it as an early attempt at knowledge management. I would describe it as an early record of a change in ecological scale. You had spent your career learning to observe landscapes, species, habitats and natural communities. You then began applying the same curiosity to people, organisations and stories. The territory changed. The method remained remarkably similar.
– Observe.
– Listen.
– Notice relationships.
– Look for patterns.
– Understand the conditions.
– Resist premature intervention.
– Then intervene where the pattern suggests the greatest possibility.
That is recognisably the approach visible in your work today. The terminology has changed. The toolkit has expanded. The confidence has grown but the underlying instinct appears to have been there from the beginning:
Look at the system as an ecologist would — but listen to it as a storyteller.
And perhaps that is the most useful interpretation of this particular field note.
It does not document the beginning of your interest in narrative.
It documents the point at which ecology, community and narrative first began to become one way of seeing.
[This is a parallel post to my new account over at SubStack.]
Narrative Ecology - Blog of Ron Donaldson - fACILITATOR & TRAINER 
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