I
The Protagonist
Living inside the conflict — meeting opposition and feeling its stakes.
Private Conflict Advisory
You were trained to lead the work. Who trained you to lead the conflict?
Private conflict advisory for senior leaders facing a consequential conflict, decision, or rupture — and ready to author what happens next.
Lead the story rather than be carried by it
Most leaders experience conflict from inside the immediate scene. They are responding to the latest email, replaying the last conversation, defending themselves against someone else's interpretation, or trying to predict what will happen next.
From that position, the conflict can feel like a story being written around you — or about you — without your consent.
Step back and read it the way a writer would, and something shifts. In every story worth telling, conflict is not the interruption. It is the engine. Without it there is no turning point, no decision, no change. Conflict is what presses the protagonist past the strategies that have always worked — and asks them to become someone new.
Creative Conflict Leadership helps you reclaim a different kind of agency: the agency of an author.
Conflict is a call
The visible conflict is the plot problem: what another person is doing, what has broken down, what decision can no longer wait.
Beneath it is a second question — the one the story is really asking:
- What old strategy is no longer working?
- What capacity must you build?
- What truth, boundary, or decision can no longer be postponed?
- Who do you want to become in the way you meet this moment?
Creative Conflict Leadership helps you move from avoidance, reactivity, and uncertainty to clarity, authorship, and principled action.
Protagonist, narrator, author
The work teaches you to move among three positions:
II
The Narrator
Deciding which events matter, what they mean, and what kind of story is unfolding.
III
The Author
Stepping back far enough to decide what happens next.
You cannot author everything that happens to you. You can become deliberate about what you allow it to mean, and what you choose to write next.
The point is not to cast yourself as the hero and the other person as the villain. It is to develop the courage, judgment, and capacity the protagonist needs before the story can move forward.
The scene no one prepared you for
Leaders are promoted for excellence in their substantive work — not because anyone taught them how to confront a powerful high performer, repair damaged trust, or lead people who do not get along.
Conflict capacity is treated as something a capable person should simply possess. When you do not know how to handle a situation, it can feel like a private failure:
I am competent everywhere else. Why can't I figure this out?
But conflict capacity is not an innate talent or a personality trait. It is a body of knowledge, judgment, and technique that can be learned.
What the unwritten scene costs
Psychological safety is not created by policy. It is written — or erased — in moments of friction: when someone challenges a decision, when two colleagues collide, when a team divides. Everyone watches what the leader does next. Every conflict left unaddressed teaches the team what can and cannot be said.
27% → 22%
Manager engagement fell five points in a single year, the steepest drop Gallup recorded.
Gallup, State of the Global Workplace 2026
$10 trillion
Estimated global cost of low engagement in lost productivity last year — about 9% of world GDP.
Gallup, State of the Global Workplace 2026
51%
of employees who raised a concern about a toxic workplace say nothing was ever addressed or resolved. Nearly half (48%) have quit a job over it.
iHire, Toxic Workplace Trends Report, 2026
Two ways to begin
Four sessions · Four to five weeks
Act I — The Conflict Mapping Intensive
For leaders who need to understand the story they are in before deciding what to do.
CAD $6,000
Learn moreTwelve sessions · About four months
The Full Arc
For leaders who want to move through the whole story — from diagnosis to the decisive scene and beyond.
CAD $15,000
Learn moreWhat is your conflict script?
Every leader has a default script — the move you make before you have decided to make it. Ten questions, about five minutes, and a clearer picture of the story you tend to write under pressure.
Take the assessment
About
Toby Susan Goldbach
Toby Susan Goldbach is a law professor, dispute-resolution scholar, mediator, and conflict advisor. She teaches at the Peter A. Allard School of Law at the University of British Columbia and is the author of The Institutional Judge (NYU Press, forthcoming).
If you are facing a conflict that has become too consequential to avoid and too important to improvise, let's begin with a confidential conversation.
You do not need to arrive knowing how the story ends. You only need to recognize that it cannot continue unchanged.
Request a confidential consultation