See Ron’s bio, photo, and Part 1 of this Q&A.
Q&A with Ron Donaldson (Question 2):
Q: Can you explain your term Knowledge Ecology? To what extent does this discipline relate to storytelling? In line with Dave Snowden, you describe storytelling as a natural or naturalistic way to share knowledge. You could undoubtedly write volumes on this subject, but if it’s possible to sum up briefly …
A: I was constantly rebuked by proper ecologists while working at English Nature because I was abusing and misusing a term (“ecology”) that meant so much to them. I graduated in geology and ecology, but that mattered little to them. The term “knowledge ecologist” arose as a joke to attract interest at a knowledge management conference to which I was invited whereby I would explain that “ideas, knowledge, and communities can be seeded, then their condition monitored and where necessary they should be nurtured or pruned just like the wildlife interest on our Nature Reserves.”
“Knowledge ecologists” already existed as early as 1998 and can be found by googling the term, and Dave Snowden himself was using “ecology” as an alternative to “management” but as I read the books and literature on complexity theory they all kept repeating that the best way to understand a complex system is as an ecology.
More recently I discovered that Victor Shelford, the American zoologist and ecologist, defined “ecology” as “the science of communities,” which I think hits the nail on the head for my use of the term.
As for the storytelling connection, in the natural ecology of our pre-history, it is my belief that three things emerged in humans at a similar time. These were language, storytelling, and the ability of the brain to store and retrieve knowledge in the form of what we now term “a story.” Storytelling is therefore the “natural” way to share knowledge, it is the way our brains process our knowledge, not in the form of expert case studies, bullet-pointed presentations, or lists, but as stories.