Better Conversations Change What’s Possible in the Workplace.
Conversation is where trust is built, ideas get surfaced, and teams decide whether they'll listen, collaborate, and move forward together. From strategic partnerships that incorporate the TALK framework, tools, and exercises into your services to high-energy keynotes with our Founder, TALK Studios offers a range of solutions to help your organization learn to give feedback, negotiate, and collaborate more effectively.
strategic partnerships
Bring the science of conversation to the people you serve.
We partner with organizations that want to integrate the TALK framework, conversation exercises, and evidence-based tools into their own programs, products, and communities. Whether you're interested in licensing TALK content, exploring a custom partnership, or becoming a certified TALK facilitator, we'd love to explore what's possible together.
Popular Speaking + Workshop Topics.
TALK: The New Science of Conversation at Work
FOR CORPORATE AUDIENCES, LEADERSHIP FORUMS, AND EXECUTIVE EVENTS
Drawing on her years of groundbreaking research, Alison Wood Brooks takes you inside the science of conversation, giving you the confidence and the advice to approach any interaction with more creativity and compassion. With clarity and humor, she examines the hidden moments and micro-decisions that drive everything from sales calls to doctor-patient discussions and speed dates to team meetings. This keynote will transform the way you view face-to-face conversations as well as those you have by phone, email, text, and social media.
TALK: Bringing Our Best Selves to Every Conversation
FOR GENERAL AUDIENCE, CONFERENCE KEYNOTES, AND MIXED-LEVEL GROUPS
Even in the easiest of conversations, we are missing abundant opportunities to connect — to be known, heard, delighted, and loved, and to do the same for others. In this insightful keynote, Alison helps people build conversational confidence and connection with research-backed tools for topic choice, question-asking, listening, levity, and kindness, especially in a world of screens and remote work.
The Trust Formula
FOR LEADERSHIP TEAMS, HR AND L&D AUDIENCES, AND CULTURE-FOCUSED EVENTS
Trust is built in small moments over time, and conversation is where those moments happen. Alison breaks down the four TALK elements that accelerate trust-building in teams and relationships, with clear practices that support psychological safety, stronger teamwork, and better relationships at work and outside of it.
Alison regularly develops bespoke sessions in close collaboration with event hosts. If one of these topics doesn't quite fit your audience, reach out, we’d love to chat.
format and logistics.
TALK Studios offers a variety of formats to fit your audience or organizational goals. Alison is exclusively represented by The Lavin Agency for speaking engagements. To inquire about availability and fees, contact Charles Yao, EVP, Director of Intellectual Talent, at cyao@thelavinagency.com.
TALK Studios partners with BTS for team consulting and rollout. To explore a consulting engagement, contact Andy Atkins, SVP, Executive and Team Performance Global Practice Leader, BTS, at Andrew.Atkins@bts.com.
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45-75 minutes; ideal for conference plenary sessions and leadership events
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90 minutes to half-day; interactive, practice-based, smaller groups
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Bespoke, tailored to a specific leadership team or strategic challenge
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Full keynote and workshop formats available via video conference
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Partner-supported rollout for organizations looking to implement TALK at scale within their leadership, meetings, and culture.
The talk book.
TALK teaches us how to better understand, learn from, and delight one another through our everyday interactions. Filled with relatable stories and surprising insights, this practical, research-backed framework will change how you approach every conversation.
ABOUT ALISON.
Alison Wood Brooks is the Founder and CEO of TALK Studios, whose mission is to help people build conversation skills at every age. She is the O’Brien Associate Professor of Business Administration at the Harvard Business School, where she helped pioneer the field of conversation science and created an oversubscribed course called TALK. Alison holds a PhD from Wharton and an AB from Princeton University. In 2025, Alison’s first book, TALK: The Science of Conversation and the Art of Being Ourselves, was named a Next Big Idea Club Must-Read, became a national bestseller, and was published in over a dozen languages. Her work has been featured in top-tier academic journals, media outlets, podcasts, and in Disney-Pixar’s 2023 movie Inside Out 2.
Look who's talking about the TALK Framework...
Look who's talking about the TALK Framework...
