Biography

Thomas Sewerin was born in Rebbelberga, Sweden, in 1948. He grew up on the rough east-side of Malmö during the 1950’ and early -60’s. He spent a year as a teenage exchange student in Rochester, New York in USA in 1965-66, came to the University of Lund that mighty year of 1968. After years of miscellaneous studies (History, Religious Studies, Sociology, Education and Psychology) and military training he graduated as a psychologist in 1975. The year 1973-74 he was an exchange student at the University of California, Santa Barbara, doing graduate studies in Sociology of Religion. There he wrote the paper, Surfing on the Bliss Wave, investigating the role of California as the geographical and spiritual source of the religious and social experiments of the New Age movement that came out in the early 1970’s.

In that package of new knowledge from the 1970’s was Transactional Analysis (TA), a psychological theory of communication and personal development, and a method of developing communication in different kinds of social settings. With some colleagues Thomas introduced TA in business environments in Sweden, Norway and Denmark and thereby grew a base of clients to start his own business in 1976. In different kinds of constellations this Thomas Sewerin AB has been in existence since then.

Thomas joined the MiL Institute as an independent consultant in 1985 to work with designing and leading Management Development Programs in many of the largest corporations of Sweden. At MiL there was a constant development of theories and methods around leadership, management team development, and the coaching of action, reflection and learning. It was a virtual hotbed of creativity in this field. Thomas coached the learning coaches of MiL for many years in series of seminars. He wrote papers, and eventually the books En plats i stolen – en arbetsbok för grupper om grupper (roughly, “Chairs – a workbook for teams about teams”) and Hållplatser – sex berättelser om coaching (“Holding Places – six stories of coaching”) on MiL’s own publishing company MiL Publishers.

With Lars Berglund and Magnus Folkesson, Thomas started a new publishing company in 2007, dedicated to workbooks for learning and team development, Tertulia books. The literal meaning of the Spanish Tertulia is café conversation, the word refers to the famous cafés of Madrid where new models of culture and community were talked forth in dynamic and spontaneous conversations among equals.

Tertulia Books published in 2008 Gå Malmö – reflektionspromander for arbetsgrupper (“Walk Malmö – reflection walks for work teams”) which is a series of exercises for teams to reflect about team development issues while walking and talking in different places of the city. The book is based on the creative notion of using places – outside of regular meeting venues – as coaches.

Thomas wrote Teams, Leadership and Coaching in 2009.

From autumn 2011 Thomas shifted focus from consultancy to Academia, enrolling on a PhD program at the Department of Psychology at Lund University.

He lives in Malmö, Sweden, with his wife Tullie Sewerin who is now retired after working as a psychologist. Three children, Adam, Mira and Måns are no pursuing their own lives and careers in and in the vicinity of their original base in Malmö.