See Ron’s bio, photo, and Part 1 of this Q&A and Part 2, Part 3, and Part 4.

Q&A with Ron Donaldson (Question 5):

Q: What future trends or directions do you foresee for story/storytelling/narrative? What’s next for the discipline?

A: Up until recently I thought the most powerful use of story was that of sharing knowledge and building community, I just couldn’t get excited about systems that hold and allow analysis of stories. In the last few months however I have been working with SenseMaker which developed out of Dave Snowden’s original concept of a narrative database.

The SenseMaker approach is a revolution in the making. The system is initially populated with narrative fragments in the form of stories, blog entries, papers, video, podcasts — whatever. The context and intended meaning of each is captured by person creating the item (“signified”) so that these fragments can be patterned according to theme, archetypal character, intended audience or numerous other filters.

Original narrative, unbiased by the interpretation of “experts,” which can then be sifted for patterns so that anyone can derive their own meaning from the original stories will revolutionise the importance and our approach to story-work.

The possibilities of using such a system for monitoring and making sense of self-signified current narrative material ranges from scenario planning, customer satisfaction, and all forms of “management, leadership and change.” It also seriously questions whether we currently make appropriate use of our experts when they would be much better used “signifying” original source material than writing biased, quickly out of date reports.

I think we are on the brink of a phase change in our understanding of the importance of story and storytelling and the implications of the emerging realisation that we live in an uncertain world, the sheer complexity of the numbers of people, communities, and economies now interconnected means that old approaches are becoming just that, old and outdated.

It is often quoted that storytelling emerged as a means of making sense of our relationship between ourselves and the environment. There is already a great disconnect between youngsters and their environment; my hope is that stories about nature and our relationship with the land can somehow re-connect and inspire a new generation of naturalists, environmental workers and,who knows, maybe some knowledge ecologists.