Perspective, Potential, Performance
Personal, Professional, & Organizational Development
Profile
People
Kevin O'Gorman
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I help individuals, teams, and organizations develop new ways of thinking, being, and acting.
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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, providing coaching, and partnering in sales. 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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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 and story.
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Publications
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Essential Elements for Developing High-Potentials, in The Handbook for Coaching in Organizations, 2015, CCL
Why I Do What I Do/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 who 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 (as I do now), though I've lived and worked in San Diego and Paris, as well as lived and studied in Dublin. A US and EU citizen, I am curious about the world, people, history, and ideas.
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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
