Dr. Joel Brown

Dr. Joel A. Davis Brown is the Chief Visionary Officer of Pneumos LLC, a management consulting company based in San Francisco, Calif., and Nairobi, Kenya, specializing in cultural intelligence, leadership development, organizational strategy and change management, and strategic storytelling. Joel is also a partner at Global Inclusion Partners, and the co-owner of the Global Inclusion Certification Program, a training and certification company that trains practitioners to support equity work on a global scale.

As a change agent, Joel works strategically with organizational leaders and professionals to cultivate innovative, creative, and adaptive environments where the cultural genius of everyone can be harnessed and leveraged successfully. In particular, he works with organizational clients to foster psychological safety, healing, belonging, and transformation. His work spans five continents, and his mission is to facilitate liberation for every global citizen.

Best known for his critical analysis, creativity, humor, and his ability to build consensus, Joel has partnered with Fortune 500 companies, nonprofit organizations, and government agencies to help them achieve sustained growth and organizational breakthroughs. He has worked with the City and County of San Francisco, Apple, Workday, UserTesting, the United Nations, Pivotal Enterprises, PricewaterhouseCoopers, the American Civil Liberties Union, Charles Schwab, Inc., the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, LinkedIn, the San Francisco Bar Association, Johnson & Johnson, Kansas City Power & Light, the Human Rights Campaign Fund, GroundSpark, the University of South Florida, the Office of Naval Intelligence, and many other Fortune 500 companies, nonprofits, and institutions of learning.

Joel has nearly 25 years of facilitation experience and is skilled in working with small- to large-scale groups. He is also an experienced executive coach who works with C-Suite executives, emerging leaders, visionaries, and “cultural creatives.” As an ICF-certified coach, Joel employs a strategic and solutions-oriented approach that supports transformational leadership. He has coached global leaders from six continents and is pursuing additional certifications in somatic and neuroplasticity-based coaching.

Joel is a member of several professional communities including SIETAR, SIETAR Europa, Young SIETAR, and International Association of Cross-Cultural Management. He is also an expert panelist with the Global Diversity, Equity & Inclusion Benchmarks, which is a globally certified benchmarking tool for change management. He is also a certified facilitator with the Cultural Detective suite of intercultural tools.

Since 2018, he has served as an adjunct professor at the IÉSEG School of Management in Lille and Paris, France, where he teaches executive MBA courses on emotional intelligence, strategic storytelling, and story listening. He has also designed programs that focus on ethics in leadership, cross-cultural dialogue, LGBTQ inclusion, and male leadership.

Joel has his Juris Doctorate from the University of Virginia School of Law and his doctorate in educational leadership from Saint Mary’s College of California, which included domestic and international coursework in design thinking, global citizenship, innovation, and peace education. He has traveled to nearly 50 countries, is conversational in Spanish, and has studied abroad in Costa Rica. Joel is also a nationally recognized spoken word artist in the United States. His forthcoming book on leadership development and LGBTQ+ inclusion, “The Souls of Queer Folk,” is set to be published in the winter of 2023.