MARLEN ESTÉVEZ

Marlén Estévez’s keynotes transform conflict into an opportunity to understand, engage in dialogue, build trust, and create value. Through listening, negotiation, and conscious leadership, she invites leaders and organizations to make better decisions and navigate difficult conversations. Her humanistic approach connects leadership, talent, and technology to build bridges, strengthen relationships, and open up new possibilities.

Those Who Listen Change the World

We live surrounded by noise, haste, and certainty. We form opinions before understanding, respond before listening, and too often confuse being right with moving forward. Drawing on more than twenty years working on highly complex conflicts, Marlén presents a simple but profoundly transformative idea: listening is not a communication technique, but a way of leading and making decisions.

The keynote explores the three forms of listening that precede any difficult decision: listening to oneself, listening to others, and listening to the world. Before understanding a conflict, we need to recognize our own fears, prejudices, and needs; before moving another person, we need to understand what they are trying to protect; and before deciding, we need to understand the context around us.

A deeply human keynote about leadership, responsibility, and relationships that leaves the audience with one question: what would change in our organizations and society if we truly learned to listen? Those who truly listen do not just change conversations. They change relationships, organizations, and sometimes the world.

From a Culture of Conflict to a Culture of Agreement

We live in an era of polarization in which every disagreement seems to require choosing a side. But disagreement does not have to end in conflict. For more than twenty years, Marlén has worked inside conflict: stalled negotiations, seemingly irreconcilable positions, and disputes in which every party was convinced they were right. That experience has taught her something essential: resolving a conflict is not only about determining who is right, but about discovering what possibilities we have not yet been able to see.

Through real cases and lessons, she shows how dialogue, curiosity, listening, and trust allow us to move beyond the logic of winners and losers and build solutions that create value. Her central thesis: reaching an agreement does not mean giving something up; it means creating. A keynote about negotiation, but also about leadership: how to build a culture in which disagreement does not destroy relationships, but can become a source of innovation, trust, and progress.

Conscious Leadership

Understand Before Resolving: Conflict always seems to be outside us: in another person, the team, a partner, or a client. Until we discover that it is also happening within us. Leaders are trained to analyze problems, but far less to observe what is happening within themselves while making a decision: fear of making a mistake, the need to be right, haste, ego, or difficulty listening to a position that challenges their own.

Drawing on her experience in dispute resolution and work developed alongside the methodology of Gary Friedman and Jack Himmelstein, Marlén distinguishes between analyzing a conflict and understanding it. The keynote proposes a leadership competency that can be trained: recognizing how our emotions, stories, and biases affect the way we interpret a situation and, from there, making decisions with greater freedom. Because there are two conversations we often confuse: who is right and what do we want to do now? This is not a keynote about mediation. It is a keynote about how we make difficult decisions.

The Art of Agreement: Transforming Conflicts into Opportunities

The most important conversations are often also the most difficult. A decisive negotiation, a stalled relationship, a client who says no, a partner with different interests, or a conversation everyone has been avoiding for months. What do great mediators know about these situations?

Marlén brings more than twenty years of experience in real conflicts into the everyday lives of leaders and organizations: how to listen beyond words, ask questions that change a conversation, uncover unspoken interests, and rebuild trust when it seems to have been lost. The keynote shows why negotiating is not only about defending our position more effectively, but about expanding the space of possibilities. A practical session on difficult conversations, negotiation, and value creation for those who need to influence, persuade, and build agreements without damaging relationships.

Humanistic Leadership: Leading in the Age of Artificial Intelligence

The more intelligent technology becomes, the more important the capabilities that make us deeply human will become. Artificial intelligence is transforming how we work, make decisions, and access knowledge. But as information and many technical capabilities begin to become commodities, a different question emerges: what will humans need to do better? Marlén explores the capabilities whose value increases precisely because of technology: judgment, listening, ethics, critical thinking, empathy, curiosity, the ability to ask good questions, and trust-building.

Drawing on her experience in conflict, leadership, and corporate governance, she argues that the real challenge of AI will not only be technological. It will also be human: how to preserve our ability to understand, decide, and connect with others in increasingly automated organizations. A keynote for leaders who want to use technology to expand human capabilities, not replace them.

Women Who Lead: Talent, Authenticity, and Purpose

What happens when women stop competing only for a seat at the table and also begin building new tables? Marlén founded Women in a Legal World from the ground up. Today it brings together more than 2,000 female executives in more than 15 countries. This experience has allowed her to observe closely what drives —and what holds back— female talent within organizations.

This keynote does not frame female leadership as a confrontation between men and women. It addresses something more ambitious: talent, meritocracy, authenticity, collaboration, and the creation of opportunities. Through her own journey and the stories of women who have broken barriers in different fields, Marlén reflects on how to build organizations where talent can develop regardless of gender and on a new form of leadership: one that measures success not only by what it achieves, but also by its ability to help others grow.

Ibero-America: Leading and Competing in Spanish

More than 600 million people speak Spanish. We share a history, a language, and a culture, but we are still far from turning all that common capital into a true competitive advantage. Drawing on her experience working between Europe and Latin America and participating in three Ibero-American Summits of Heads of State, Marlén asks a question: what would happen if we began to think of Ibero-America not only as a cultural community, but as a global platform for talent, investment, and influence?

The keynote explores how trust, alliances, legal certainty, talent, and greater connections between leaders and companies can turn the Ibero-American space into a genuine competitive advantage. An invitation to build bridges between countries, generations, institutions, and companies, and to take a more ambitious place in a global conversation in which Spanish still has enormous room to grow.