Intro -- Frank Totino LO12806

frank totino (frank@varvet.helsingborg.se)
Fri, 07 Mar 1997 16:27:06 +0000

Greetings,

I would like to introduce myself to what seems to be a very interesting
group of thinkers.

I find the existance of this list both amazing and stimulating. I wonder
what we will find out in time with such a thing.

One part of my background is the theatre and the telling of stories. I
work as a director, a teacher, an actor and as a consultant sometimes.

If myths are frameworks for understanding or describing our relationship
to our universe, then stories may be the way to understanding how to build
our new societies. This is my interest in being part of this net.

The methods I use seem to have application in the field of organizational
learning. It is for this reason that I was invited to be part of research
into Participatory Action Learning Methods with the Canada-Asia
Partnership in the early 90's. This was with respect to community
development in the Third World, but in application has ramifications for
community development anywhere. This is the other part of my background
and interest.

I have been giving workshops in the nature of spontaneity and
improvisation for many years and quite often among the participants are
people from fields having nothing to do with being in the theatre nor are
they always interested in being actors. The kind of theatre that I am
involved with, the theatre of ideas, is popular and so folk want to find
out more about the guts of it as it were. So I have many people from many
fields in the workshops. Some of them are teachers, some are physicists,
some are therapists and some are business consultants of one kind or
another.

>From time to time I find myself hired as a consultant to development
groups or to businesses going through the changes required in bringing the
people up to the level of their technology in terms of communicating with
each other. Sometimes the work is just about being in a group that does
not feel very much like a group.

Now that I have finally caught on to the technology, a little, I am
actually writing to a list such as this with great curiosity as to how I
may be interacting as a result.

My questions are about what I have to offer the learning net and about how
much I can assimilate from it. I hope to be able to be useful to those I
can be of service to and to collaborate in the development new ideas, or
perhaps better, to help develop ideas into "new realities".

At present I am in Sweden directing a group in experimental learning
methods. We work is in conjuction with a "social" experiment in how
thinking processes affect individuals. The source of their new process is
from the Kaos Pilots or Chaos Management Group of Denmark. Anyhow, my
work in group development seems to go along with the ideas here. We are
just getting the thing off the ground after months of trying to get such a
thing off the ground in a very "traditional" linear system. I'll let you
know how things go.

Frank Totino
Action Teater 2002
frank@varvet.helsingborg.se

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frank totino <frank@varvet.helsingborg.se>

Learning-org -- An Internet Dialog on Learning Organizations For info: <rkarash@karash.com> -or- <http://world.std.com/~lo/>