Peacemaker · Speaker · Author · Mediator
I teach executives the specific skill that reopens the room, and I have spent twenty-five years proving it works in the hardest environments in the world.
25 years resolving conflict
2,000 mediations
12,000 inmates trained
Four published books
The Problem
What would your leadership team be capable of if the real conversation didn't wait until after the meeting?
Somewhere along the way, your meetings got quiet. Not silent. Polite. Agreeable. Slightly airless. Your best people started raising the hard concerns in the hallway instead of the room. Your senior hires started leaving for reasons your exit interviews never captured. Your decisions took two meetings to close instead of one, and the second meeting was where the real conversation happened.
How much are you already paying for the resignations you didn't see coming?
None of this is a communication problem. It is a nervous system problem. Every executive who has ever been sharpened in front of their peers has learned to bring you the version of the truth they can defend rather than the version you need to see. That behavior is trainable. So is the reversal.
How important is it to you that your leadership team brings you the truth in the room, not in a resignation email?
The Solution
The move that changes what happens in your leadership room is smaller than most people assume. It is a two-second sentence a leader learns to say when someone raises a concern, before responding to the content of the concern.
The neuroscience is well established. Naming an emotion in another person accurately reduces the threat response in their brain within seconds. The person in front of you can think again. So can you.
What would you pay for a leadership team that stops circling and starts closing?
I have taught this move to Fortune 500 executives. I have taught it to maximum-security inmates who used it to defuse gang violence inside prisons. It works the same way in a boardroom as it does in a cell block, because the human nervous system does not know the difference.
If your executives were bringing you the numbers with the rough edges still attached, how different would your last quarter have looked?
What I Do
Keynotes · Executive Roundtables · Team Training · Private Coaching · Mediation
01
A ten-week engagement for a single leadership team, up to fifteen people. Two to three hours to open, then one hour per week for ten weeks. Your team practices the method under progressively higher stakes until the skill is available in the room, not just on paper. Delivered in-person or virtual.
02
A small cross-company cohort of founders and CEOs, six to ten seats per group. We meet weekly for an hour over eight weeks. Each session works on the actual leadership problem a participant is carrying into the week, using the method as the operating system. Every participant walks out with a peer group that has watched them work.
Doug also delivers keynotes, private 1:1 executive coaching, and mediation on request. Reach out to discuss.
On the TEDx Stage
My TEDx talk, "How to Listen Someone Into Existence," walks through the two-word move at the center of the method. It has been used in leadership programs, therapy training curricula, and hostage-negotiation courses.
If you have ninety seconds, the talk shows you what the practice actually looks like when a person does it accurately.
Adopted by Fortune 500 Companies and 10,000+ Graduates Worldwide
“Doug Noll is a dynamic plenary speaker and an outstanding workshop presenter. He combines his knowledge, experience and wit to engage the audience and receive their full attention and participation in his presentation.”
“Doug Noll is one of the most powerful speakers and teachers I have ever seen. He has taken complex ideas from cognitive psychology and neuroscience, distilled the essence of what is important to us for de-escalating strong emotions in conflicts, and presented his ideas in an entertaining, easy-to-follow, and engaging manner.”
“'Ignore the words, listen only for the emotions'. Why have I not realized this before, in all my 56 years!? You truly are having a positive impact and making ripples, literally, around the world. Add to that the framework for stacking the affect layers and their order of presentation. Wow!”
About Doug
I spent twenty-two years as an AV-rated commercial trial lawyer before deciding I had built the wrong career. I left the practice and spent the next decade studying how humans actually resolve conflict, formally at Fresno Pacific University's peacemaking program and informally in every hard room I could get into.
In 2010 I co-founded Prison of Peace, a program that trains life-sentence and maximum-security inmates in the same de-escalation method I teach executives. Twelve thousand inmates trained to date, in prisons across the United States and internationally. The program earned me California Attorney of the Year in 2012.
I am the author of four books, most recently "Empathy Leadership: The Powerful Skill That Drives Winning Results." I hold the Sid Lezak Award of Excellence from the International Academy of Mediators and Neutral of the Year from the National Academy of Distinguished Neutrals. If you have watched me speak or heard me on a podcast, this is what I do the rest of the time.
Start the conversation
Book a call. We talk for twenty minutes about what is happening in your leadership team and whether what I do is a fit. If it is, we discuss the format that matches your situation. If it is not, I point you to someone better suited.
