ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Ken Chalmers has spent his career bridging adversarial and collaborative approaches to conflict. He practiced commercial law on Bay Street in Toronto for more than twenty years, primarily as a litigator handling complex commercial disputes, employment, construction, intellectual property, and professional liability matters, as well as advising senior management and boards on strategic and legal issues. He developed extensive experience with alternative dispute resolution as a practitioner, including negotiation, mediation, and arbitration, supported by Harvard mediation training and an LLM in Dispute Resolution and Conflict Management from Osgoode Hall Law School. For fifteen years, Ken served as legal counsel to PBB Global Logistics and as a member of its board of directors. Following the company’s IPO, he joined the senior executive team and subsequently became CEO, leading the company through a period of rapid growth and organizational transformation.

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Over time, his studies and increasingly varied professional experience reshaped how Ken understood conflict. The adversarial mindset that had served him well in court often worked against him in other settings, while the most effective leaders he encountered had developed of skills that draw on emotional regulation, strategic flexibility, and the capacity to engage disagreement as a source of insight rather than a threat.

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Ken has spent more than a decade teaching conflict resolution, negotiation, and business law at the university and college levels, including more than twenty-five cohorts in Humber Polytechnic's postgraduate certificate program in Alternative Dispute Resolution. Teaching has allowed him to continue developing, clarifying, testing, and refining his frameworks, drawing on more recent research in cognitive science, positive psychology, communication, and negotiation studies.

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Conflict Competency: Eight Skills Leading to Better Outcomes draws on all three roles. It combines the strategic discipline of a litigator, the organizational realities of an executive, and the accumulated learning of a practitioner-educator who has been refining these ideas with working professionals across industries. The book integrates research from cognitive science, positive psychology, complexity theory, communication, and negotiation studies into a practical framework designed for moments when conflict triggers a threat response and skills people they know in principle become hard to access.

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Ken writes on conflict, leadership, and the practice of difficult conversations at kwchalmers.substack.com. He has spent most of his adult life in Toronto and now spends an increasing amount of his time at his cottage north of the city, where he hosts a large extended family, including a growing number of grandchildren, all of whom have strong opinions about everything. Conflict Competency is his first book.