Thompson Barton

I was born in 1944.

I was raised in Little Rock, Arkansas, and witnessed the contentious integration of Central High School. I was deeply disturbed and fascinated by the fear and the behaviors I witnessed. Since then, our fear of one another has become the focus of my experience as a human being.

At fifteen years old, our family moved to Memphis, Tennessee. Rhodes College in Memphis was integrated peacefully while I was a student there, but Martin Luther King was shot in downtown Memphis during that time. King’s assassination was a study in fear, unaccountability and dishonesty. The Vietnam War was raging, too. John F. Kennedy was assassinated, as well. Fear and violence raged on. I noticed blame seemed to go hand in hand with fear, creating an endless cycle of retribution and hostility. After graduating from Rhodes with a degree in Economics, and deciding against going to law school, I taught public high school for a few years. I also taught in community college and then the Holistic Psychology MA program of Antioch University, San Francisco, CA, (1983-1987), from which I received an MA in 1982. The Holistic Psychology MA program was founded by Will Schutz, PhD. His organizational behavior training, called The Human Element (THE), is the foundation of my Accountable Communication Technology training.

Following seven years of apprenticeship with Dr. Schutz I worked in the Northwest for several national organizational development firms as a consultant and trainer.

In 1991, I teamed up with Don White, who, applying The Human Element, had been creating extraordinary results for seven years within Proctor & Gamble, where he was employed. Don and I have been delivering Accountable Communication Technology training and consulting since that time.