Thomas Gaultier
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Speaking and teaching

Conferences, universities and closed-door sessions

I speak where the audience has to do something on Monday: operators, boards, mediators, and the students who will be running these processes in ten years.

Teaching

Where I teach

Universidade Católica Portuguesa

Lecturer, negotiation and mediation

Two courses: International Commercial Negotiation, taught in English, and Negociação e Tomada de Decisão, co-taught in Portuguese. Both run as flipped seminars, built on live cases rather than case books.

Forward College, Lisbon

Law professor, first year

From News to Law: Understanding Legal Systems, and Discovering Legal Reasoning: How Lawyers Think. Both start from what students already argue about and work backwards into the doctrine.

ICFML

Co-founder and Vice-President

The certification body for Portuguese-speaking mediators, training and accrediting practitioners across Portugal, Brazil and Lusophone Africa.

Thomas Gaultier presenting risk analysis applied to litigation at a mediation conference
Presenting at a mediation conference hosted by the Turkish Ministry of Justice.

Topics

What I am usually asked to talk about

Every one of these comes out of a mandate rather than a literature review, which means I can name what went wrong as readily as what worked.

What community conflict actually costs

The 50 to 70 percent NPV finding, what sits underneath it, and why the number never appears in the risk register until it is already a write-down. Built for boards and investment committees.

Grievance mechanisms that people use

Why most operational grievance mechanisms fail the UN Guiding Principles effectiveness criteria in practice while passing them on paper, and what a working one looks like.

Mediating when the power is all on one side

The technical core of the practice: process design under asymmetry, trauma-informed track selection, and what a mediator does when one party can simply wait the other out.

Consent is not a signature

FPIC as an operational process rather than a compliance artefact, and what goes wrong when a project treats consent as a milestone to be achieved by a date.

The invisible profession

What community relations practitioners actually absorb, why turnover in the role is what it is, and what a company loses every time one of them leaves.

Press

Media and commentary

I comment on company-community conflict, social licence and critical minerals, in English, French, Portuguese and Spanish. For deadline enquiries, email me directly rather than using the form.

Mining Journal, March 2024

The battle to prise open Europe's largest lithium mine at Barroso, Portugal

Troubleshooter Gaultier must deal with people who view mining and pollution as different sides of the same coin.

Read the article

For organisers

Tell me who is in the room and what you want them arguing about afterwards. I would rather build the session around that than deliver a stock keynote.

  • Keynotes and panels
  • Half-day and full-day workshops
  • Facilitated simulation for up to 40 participants
  • Guest lectures for university programmes

University programmes teaching negotiation, mediation, mining engineering or ESG: I send review copies of the books and I am usually happy to do a session with the cohort.

Planning an event, a cohort, or an internal session?

Send me the date, the audience and what you want them to leave able to do. If I am not the right speaker for it, I will usually know someone who is.

Every first conversation is confidential.