Online Conference 5-11 July 2021
February 2–7, 2027
Vienna, Austria
Professional Development Workshop
Wednesday 3 February
Afternoon, half-day workshop
Code: PDW 13
Presenter: Mal O’Connor
Mal O’Connor
Mal O’Connor is a Principal Emeritus at CFAR. For over 30 years he has used his training as a cultural ethnographer to approach his
clients’ individual and organizational challenges from a psychodynamic and systems thinking perspective. During that time, Mal worked with senior executives, their boards and staff,
across a broad spectrum of for-profit and non-profit organizations, helping them create strategy and implement systemic change that preserves organizational cultural values while measurably
improving performance and productivity.
Building on his work teaching therapists about organizational consulting for many years at the William Alanson White Institute, Mal decided to focus primarily
on executive coaching after retiring from consulting work at CFAR. He works with executives who understand the importance of continuous development to meet increasingly complex challenges as
their responsibilities transform and expand in ways that integrate the personal with the professional.
His book, The Moment You Can’t Ignore: When Big Trouble Leads to a Great Future, written with Barry Dornfeld, focuses on the difference that paying
attention to organizational culture can make between change efforts that stall out and organizational transformation that delivers sustainable results.
Mal holds a Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania’s Department of Folklore and Folklife, where his dissertation focused on the playful dimensions of
work with an emphasis on innovation in tool design and person-machine interaction. He is a faculty member in the Dynamics of Consulting Program, a psychological and systems thinking oriented
program designed for senior level coaches and consultants. He is a member of the International Society for the Psychoanalytic Study of Organizations (ISPSO) and the American Folklore Society,
and devotes many hours each week to learning and playing jazz piano.
This half-day workshop originated in a five-year consultancy with a group of eight primary care organizations in the United States. Their goal was to strengthen the historically weak role of primary care in the United States health system and increase nationwide investment in primary care.
Over 25 years in consulting I had never committed to a consultancy of that duration, nor to one national in its scope. The work challenged me in ways I had not experienced before. I had to discover ways to manage the highs and lows of an initiative with both successes and failures along the way. On this project I ran directly into my own senses of omnipotence and impotence on almost a daily basis.
Laurent Lapierre, in his 1989 article, “Mourning, Potency, and Power in Management” informed my thinking. After a damaging setback halfway through the initiative, his “relative potency” framework helped me understand how to assume my consulting role much more effectively.
After that work ended, I began to share my experience, and test the “relative potency” framework, with cohorts in the Dynamics of Consulting program, directed by Larry Hirschhorn.
This workshop builds on that work and explores how the use of one’s authority in consulting and coaching roles can help consultants, coaches and their clients reach desired objectives by integrating the concepts of omnipotence and impotence to achieve relative potency.
At the end of the workshop participants will be able to:
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