Perspective, Potential, Performance
Personal, Professional, & Organizational Development
Profile
People
Kevin O'Gorman
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I help people, teams, and organizations grow into new ways of thinking, being, and acting.
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My work:
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Creates a personal and social forum in which people step back from the unconscious bubble/snow globe they/(we all) live in so they can, watch it, consider it, deconstruct its origins (if needed), and understand how it functions in, and impacts, their lives. This applies to personal and professional growth and also culture change where the social contract and culture need to be addressed and aligned.
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Enhances agency so people experience a much larger and diverse buffet of ideas, identities, and sense of self allowing them to generate/author their personal and social narrative ‘realities’ as needed.
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Results include higher agility, resilience, and agency affecting how people engage situations and relationships, as well as how they relate to their thoughts, beliefs, and feelings. For the individual, this translates into an increase in analysis, strategic thinking, self-confidence, and social influence -- all key elements of leadership. For the organization, there is an increase in collective sense-making, diversity of perspectives and new ideas, problem-solving, collaboration, and overall performance.
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Why/Point-of-View
The human ability to adapt, and the degree to which we avoid it, has always fascinated me. How can we be so well-equipped to change and so ill-equipped to set that change in motion? Over time, I saw that we both inherit and create stories. In most cases, these are stories we live within, some inherited by our culture, some forged through experiences. At some point, we have forgotten that these are stories and have acted as if they are reality'. We forget that we have a choice, to reconsider and rewrite both the stories we inherited and the ones we made up. As the author, we own these stories and our relationship to them.
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Change requires changing our relationship with these stories. At Neuragility, we provide processes so people and organizations re-own their capacities to generate new narratives -- new personal and social realities. This is not always easy. Often, when the complexity of our circumstances overwhelms the stories we have been living within. Our identity and beliefs -- what we have come to think of as ourselves -- feel threatened. As we reclaim our agency, we take apart and recombine whom we think we are and our assumptions about how the world works. Creating these new relationships takes detachment, discipline, reflection, humility, curiosity, playfulness, and courage.
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Fortunately, when we live beyond our stories we discover a kaleidoscope of capacities, notions, and strategies that can be recombined in infinite ways. Freed to play dynamically, we adapt as a matter of course to constant, disruptive, and dynamic change. We are past using old patterns built for less complex situations or demanding the world conform to our historical comforts.
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About me
I traveled extensively as a business consultant across five continents and 35 countries helping people, teams, and organizations leverage challenges and opportunities. I grew up near downtown Manhattan in a nice suburb but went to high school in an inner-city, worked on a dairy farm in upstate New York, a golf course in Vermont, hitchhiked to Alaska, and lived in a treehouse. For most of my adult life, I called San Francisco home, though I've lived in San Diego, the center of Paris, and a Georgian in Dublin. A US and EU citizen, I am curious about the world, people, history, and ideas (see Mind Map below).
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Favorite Quotes
“Our lives begin to end the day we are silent about things that matter.” Martin Luther King, Jr.
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"A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices" William James
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"Without your wounds where would your power be?" Thornton Wilder
Bio
Experience
Forty years of experience in business and psychology applied to consulting, training, coaching, sales, and public speaking from first-line managers to the C-suite on five continents. Currently, I am the founder (2020) and Managing Director of Neuragility; ten years prior I spent with the Center for Creative Leadership leading leadership strategy, client teams, creating and designing leadership programs, and providing coaching, and sales partnerships. Prior to CCL, I led, for twenty years as Managing Director, Ideation, a San Francisco-based consulting, coaching, and training firm with a global team of affiliates in Moscow, London, Paris, and Singapore. Ideation focused on disruptive organizational change, executive development, cross-cultural agility, and M&A culture integration.
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Before Ideation, I worked in market research, retail sales, and corporate account management in high-tech. Later, I became Director, Marketing, and Sales for a boutique consulting firm in Palo Alto, CA, and held the position of Acting Director, Human Resources for a San Francisco Bay Area software company. I started my career as a psychotherapist and organizational development consultant.
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The bases of my work:
1.A systems, narrative, and neurocognitive science-based approach to personal and organizational change, strategy, culture, talent, and leadership development.
2.An action-focused, robust decision model that helps leaders make more strategic decisions.
3.An existential development approach that deepens and expands the people's worldviews providing greater perspective and agency so leaders can better engage and lead people through new strategies and change.
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Education
I started as a Philosophy major and eventually transferred to the University of Vermont where I studied an applied systems approach, mapping natural systems to Social Work, and then moved to Education and Counseling Psychology receiving a BS, Education. I also hold an MA, Counseling Psychology from Antioch-New England with concentrations in Organizational Development and Family Systems. Later in my career, I moved to Ireland to conduct (ABD) doctoral work in the Business School, Trinity College, Dublin, Ireland on how leaders can more effectively frame and create transformational change using metaphor.
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Publications
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Essential Elements for Developing High-Potentials, in The Handbook for Coaching in Organizations, 2015, CCL
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The Unclaimed Self: Reclaiming Your Life and Transcending Your Times, Book in Progress:
My Mind Map
Reference Points
