Q1: "Hi Danilo. I remember being very impressed with your session at the Nottingham TOC for Education conference. Could you give my readers a little background about yourself and your TOC journey to date?
Thanks Clarke: About my background, I am currently an Associate Professor of Management at Saginaw Valley University in Michigan. I have a Master in Industrial and Systems Engineering and a Ph.D. in Business both from the University of Memphis. I first learned about TOC in a very strange way...It was 1992 and I was about to start my Ph.D. program. I was living in an apartment complex and one of my classmates asked me to take care of his cat. Not being familiar with American culture yet, I felt that request was kind of strange because in my country of origin, Nicaragua, cats either hunt or die. In any event, I went to his apartment to get the necessary instructions. While taking care of his cat, I was looking for something to read and among all his books, I randomly selected The Goal. As many other people in the world, I could not put down the book until I finished it. I was so fascinated that I asked my Ph.D. advisor if he has more information.
He told me that he in fact has heard about TOC and suggested I take some training...the workshop I ended up attending was the Jonah course. Being an engineer, the structured nature of the different tools fascinated me. I have learned other problems solving techniques but TOC seems to make more sense to me.
My very first applications of the thinking processes (TP) were to do case study analysis in my doctorate coursework. I would simply write the different issues of the cases in post it notes and then build logic trees and clouds to write my reports. I also use the TP to help me with my dissertation which was based on a computer simulation of a supply chain. Basically what I did was to write the results of the simulation on different post it notes and then do logic relationships to try to explain the results. Those trees were the basis to write my findings. I did some other minor applications of the TP to improve my chess abilities and to deal with personal decisions. At that point, I did not realize that the TP could be a powerful tool to teach, I was just trying to get my degree finished and have some fun writing trees.
Once I starting working as a faculty member, it became clear to me that a doctorate does not necessarily prepare you for teaching. Maybe that have changed but I had very little training on the best practices related to pedagogical approaches. The desire to become a better teacher forced me to look for alternative ways to get my students engaged other than just lecturing from a set of prepared slides. I used my experience as a student and my two daughters as "guinea pigs" to develop teaching applications which have become generic enough to be used in a variety of courses, including reading, math, science, etc. I have used TOC for Education international conference as a main outlet to present my work but I have also presented them in traditional academic conferences. I have also conducted workshops for K-12 teachers and college professors.
In addition to my work on education, in the last two years I have been involved in consulting projects providing my support in the Marketing and Sales areas.
