Alberta Facilitator

No. Positive Impact is based in Victoria, BC, and our facilitators travel to Alberta for in-person work. It’s one of the shorter trips we make, which keeps the travel line modest. We’d rather say plainly that we don’t have an Alberta office than imply one, and arriving without a history with anyone in the group is often the more useful half of being an outsider.

If your team sits in one city, go to that city’s page. We have a Calgary facilitator page and an Edmonton facilitator page, and each goes into more detail on the sectors and rhythms of that market. This page is for organizations whose footprint is the province: multi-site employers, provincial associations, industry bodies, and any group that pulls people in from both cities and the field.

Red Deer, more often than people expect. The two cities are three hours apart and don’t think of themselves as one market, so picking either one makes the session feel like it belongs to that office. Red Deer sits roughly midway, which nobody can argue with, and the drive is short enough from both ends that a full day still works. Choose Calgary or Edmonton when the work is genuinely anchored to one of them, and choose it deliberately rather than by default.

By making the uncertainty part of the session rather than the thing everyone works around. A useful Alberta planning day usually includes an explicit look at what the group would do under materially better and materially worse conditions, which turns an argument about whose forecast is right into a set of decisions the team can actually make now. Groups often find the disagreement was never about the numbers, it was about what they’d be willing to give up.

Yes, and it’s one of the more common reasons we’re called in this province. In an organization that has been through repeated restructuring, raising a risk out loud can feel like volunteering, so concerns get discussed in the corridor and reach the agenda too late. We use written-first and anonymous input more heavily here than we might elsewhere, because it lets someone put a risk on the table without it reading as a personal position. What surfaces is usually already widely known and simply unsaid.

Leadership teams, boards, and departments across private, public, and non-profit organizations. In Alberta that tends to mean energy and energy services, financial and professional services, technology, construction and industrial operations, agriculture and food processing, health networks, post-secondary institutions, provincial ministries and agencies, and municipalities. Group size ranges from an executive team of eight to a leadership summit of sixty, and the design shifts considerably between those two.

Six to eight weeks is comfortable for an in-person session, and more if you’re coordinating travel from both cities and the field. That window covers a proper discovery call, a session design built around your goals rather than a template, and any pre-work such as an anonymous survey or interviews. If your people work rotational schedules, tell us early, because that decides the date more than anyone’s calendar does. Virtual sessions can move faster.

A written summary with the decisions made, the commitments people made out loud, and who owns what by when. Most sessions also produce something structural, such as a plan on a page, a set of priorities the group agreed to, or shared language for how the team communicates. The point is traction on Monday morning rather than a good feeling that fades by Wednesday. We can stay involved afterward if you want support keeping it alive.