Jacob Noon

Who I am

Trainer. Dramaturg of learning.

I'm not a facilitator who reads from slides. I design learning situations.

Each one has a dramatic arc: experience first, framework second. Participants experience first, understand afterwards.

That's the difference between knowledge that stays — and knowledge that's gone by the coffee break.

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Where I come from

Patchwork kid. Theatre-maker. Startup founder.

Two households. Two very different sets of rules. Two worlds that didn't agree on much. Raised by my hippie mother at her organic shop in Berlin-Weißensee. By twelve I felt old enough to move in with my anarchic father in Neukölln — a man who went to protests and questioned, on principle, any rule that claimed to be self-evident.

When you grow up like that, you learn something quickly: conflict isn't the exception. Conflict is just Tuesday.

Later I studied social and cultural sciences — not out of academic interest, but because I wanted to collect as many perspectives on human life together as I could.

The conviction that carries my work: you don't find the solution around the tension. You find it inside it.

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Core topics: conflict management, negotiation, leadership communication.

I work with large corporates and mid-market companies, often through training providers such as Cegos, edutrainment, MR Education and Modul Training. Clients include Lufthansa, Amazon, Siemens Energy, Maersk, Schüco and Aareal Bank.

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My craft is the theatre. Over a decade on stage: actor. Co-founder of a theatre company. Forum Theatre after Augusto Boal — a year on tour with scenes such as sexist incidents on the U-Bahn, to an audience that didn't watch but stepped in and looked for ways out. Improv comedy with the Improvisionäre in Berlin.

What fascinates me about theatre: theatre needs conflict. And it escalates it. No tension, no scene. Every good dramaturgy is an escalation of conflict.

My work today is the inverse. Making conflict workable. De-escalating where it poisons. Holding it where it's productive.

The craft behind it — reading rooms, reading bodies, seeing dynamics before they tip — I learned on stage.

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Also: founder and CEO of a tech startup. I know conflict not just from the training room, but from the leadership chair itself.

One example. I was pushing for clear deadlines — I had to stand in front of clients and promise features. On a date. You can't sell a maybe.

My head of development saw it completely differently. Not out of obstruction — out of integrity. He knew better than anyone how complex the work actually was. And that overpromising isn't just a delivery problem — it's a trust problem, a quality problem, a team-morale problem.

We argued regularly. We never fully resolved it. And that was right.

The tension between "we need to sell this" and "we need to build this right" isn't a bug in a startup. It's a feature. It exists because both things genuinely matter. A CEO without that pushback overpromises. A head of development without that pressure loses sight of commercial reality. The conflict kept us honest.

The goal was never to make it disappear. The goal was to have it well.

Alongside that, there's the other kind: the conflict that could be resolved — and quietly poisons everything until it is. The conversation that keeps not happening. The thing nobody is saying out loud. That one needs a completely different approach.

Both kinds end up on the table. Often participants don't know yet which one they're dealing with. That's exactly where we start.

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Education & Training

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Certifications

The formal foundation of my work — each certification available as a PDF:

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Three Pillars

Models & Frameworks

The theoretical foundations that inform my work:

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