Scott Walker spent 20 years as a kidnap for ransom negotiator. 300+ cases across every major continent. Pirates. Terrorist groups. Armed kidnappers threatening mock executions on the phone.
Every single person he negotiated for came back alive.
What struck me most wasn’t the high-stakes drama, but how directly the lessons he’s learnt apply to everyday business.
He told me that 80% of his time on a case wasn’t spent negotiating with kidnappers. Rather, it was spent dealing with his own side.
Internal politics, egos, competing demands – people avoiding the hard conversations that needed to happen.
He called it “the crisis within the crisis.” Sound familiar?
Me and Scott talked about:
- Why conflict is not a dirty word, and why avoiding difficult conversations makes everything worse
- The 90-second rule: why you can’t stop the cortisol dump, and what to do while you ride it out
- Why rushing to solve the problem usually means solving the wrong problem
- How to listen at “level five” (for what’s not being said).
- The one thing every person in a negotiation actually wants.
This turned out to be an absolute masterclass in negotiation. The same techniques that work when someone’s threatening to kill the hostages also work when you’re trying to close a deal or have a hard conversation with your team. Pretty wild.
There’s a moment where he talks about his first case, too. It was the start of 20 years of practice in what he calls “the immediate action drill.”