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. He had served PBB Global Logistics as legal counsel and as a member of its board of directors for fifteen years, and following the company's IPO, he joined as a senior executive, subsequently becoming CEO and leading the company through a period of rapid growth and organizational transformation. During his time at PBB, enterprise value increased more than threefold over four years. The role involved building a high-performing senior team, engaging the broader organization, and leading a cultural change committed to continuous improvement.

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That experience reshaped how Ken understood conflict. The adversarial mindset that had served him well in court often worked against him in the executive suite, and the most effective leaders he encountered had developed a different set of skills entirely, 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 College'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 that meets readers where they actually struggle, in the moments when conflict triggers a threat response and skills 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.