Keynote

What great leaders do before the lawyers arrive.

Conflict is avoided by most. The fear of discomfort and rejection hold us back. Even in business context where the stakes are high:

• We step in late. By then HR is tense, Legal is circling, and people are polishing up their résumés.
• Meetings avoid the real issue: side chats, sarcasm, and email wars do the talking.
• Two executives take positions and dig themselves in, everyone else chooses a side, and decisions stall.
• Cross-border power games and status gaps make it riskier to speak than to stay silent.
• We escalate, or we replace people instead of resetting the work. Delays, reversals, and politics take over a once pleasant culture.
• I need a way to spot tension early, surface the unsaid, without blowing trust.

Conflict is a resource, not a fire to avoid. Tension should be treated as an early signal that competing views are at work. The goal is to use these to our advantage: surface what’s really at stake, remove politics, and focus on the decision that moves the business.

Handled early, conflict is your fastest tool to good decisions. We start by mapping what others miss: avoidance patterns, triangulation, and the “polite” tells that predict escalation. The ‘Early-Warning Map’ makes tensions visible, names interests and power, and shows where to cut in.

Learn to make the unsaid sayable, without drama. Set a shared outcome, invite dissent from participants, and test assumptions in plain language. The conversation about the competing views is run with tight roles and rules, so defensive responses don’t overtake rational moves.

Then we make choices stick. We clarify ownership, identify derailers, kill unnecessary roadblocks and bring conversations back to polite, yet sharp and clear. Especially in a global, multi-cultural setting, conflict is a source of higher quality and better decisions, if handled with tact.