British Columbia Facilitator
Facilitated planning, leadership and team sessions for organizations across British Columbia, from the coast to the north.
We create sessions that are greater than the sum of their parts, guided by award-winning facilitators.
- 110,000+people facilitated globally
- Award-winningfacilitators
- Coast to the northin person, virtual or hybrid
We design sessions that leave teams with shared clarity, specific commitments, and the momentum to follow through.
Trusted by teams across the public, private and non-profit sectors
British Columbia
Facilitation for teams spread across a very large province
Positive Impact facilitates strategic planning, leadership development, team retreats, and change management for organizations across British Columbia. BC is really three operating realities in one province, and an organization working across the coast, the Interior and the north plans differently because of it.
For a team in one market, our Vancouver, Victoria, Nanaimo and Whistler pages go into more detail. This page is for organizations whose footprint is the province: multi-site employers, provincial associations, health authorities, First Nations organizations and public sector bodies whose people are spread from the Island to the northeast.
What we do
The areas we're called in for most
Every engagement starts with your context. If your challenge isn't listed here, ask us anyway.
Strategic Planning
A BC plan has to work in a Vancouver boardroom and in a community five hours up a highway. We facilitate the process so the people delivering it in those places help shape it rather than receive it.
Learn moreCommunication Training & COMS
Our own communication styles framework, giving teams a common language for how they each work. It travels well between a head office and a site that only sees the leadership team twice a year.
Learn moreTeam Development & Team Building
Retreats, offsites and tailored sessions that build the trust and psychological safety strong teams depend on. BC has more genuinely good offsite country within two hours of a city than anywhere else we work.
Culture & Engagement
From vision and values work to culture shifts, we help turn shared purpose into commitments people live by, in organizations where the coast, the Interior and the north each have their own way of doing things.
Leadership Development & Executive Coaching
Hands-on coaching and development for managers and executives. Working in the Pacific time zone means coaching sessions land inside your working day rather than at the edges of it.
Corporate Training
Participant-led training designed around your people, with tools that stay useful long after the session ends. Delivered region by region, or once to a group pulled in from all of them.
Every engagement we run is shaped around your team. Share what you're working on and we'll build the right session around it.
Share what you're working onHow We Facilitate
Sessions that turn conversation into a plan your team can actually run with
There's no prepared script. We guide the process, your team brings the expertise, and together we build toward a plan your people helped shape and will actually use.
Here that means designing for a group that is almost never all in one place, and being honest about which parts of the day genuinely need everyone physically together. Facilitator-guided, participant-led, wherever people are sitting.
Get in Touch
Why work with us
Three ways teams here engage a facilitator
Every engagement is customizable, but most start in one of these shapes.
Quarterly or monthly
Ongoing Partnership
A facilitator who gets to know your team over time, so trust deepens and development compounds instead of starting fresh each session. Mostly virtual, anchored by one or two in-person days a year.
Best for: making development a habit rather than a one-off.
Ask about a partnershipMulti-day, immersive
Multi-Day Offsite
Extended session for strategic planning, leadership development or a culture shift. When we're flying east anyway, two days costs far less per day than one.
Best for: bigger decisions that need room to breathe.
Talk about an offsiteHalf-day to full-day
Single Workshop
A focused session built around one goal, whether that's a decision, a kickoff, or a skill like communications or building trust and psychological safety.
Best for: teams that know exactly what they need to work through.
Ask about a workshop
How we facilitate
A clear path from first call to follow-through
Each engagement follows a similar path, and includes the same care, from your first call to the work that carries on after we fly home.
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Discovery
A call to understand your context, your goals, and which regions need to be at the table.
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Design
Customized session design, built around your team, not a template.
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Facilitation
An experienced facilitator in the room or online, and in the room the day before.
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Materials
Materials and tools your team can keep using afterward.
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Follow-up
A summary with commitments and clear next steps.
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Support
Optional support to help momentum carry past the session.
Why facilitation?
How a team works together shapes everything it creates.
$100 Million
is the yearly cost for big companies for staff being in pointless meetings.
65%
of senior managers say that meetings keep them from completing their own work.
58%
of Americans would rather go to a doctor's appointment than attend a work meeting.
75%
of decision-makers feel that collaboration needs to be improved in their companies.
Forrester Research, 2021
Outcomes
What your team walks away with
Better decisions, made together
Decisions the whole room actually gets behind, instead of quiet disagreement that surfaces later in the parking lot.
Real buy-in
Because people helped shape the outcome, they leave genuinely invested in it, not just told what was decided.
Stronger team connection
The kind of trust and psychological safety that lets high-performing teams work well together, including the folks who only ever see each other on a screen.
Action that sticks
Clear commitments and ownership that carry into Monday morning, not just good intentions on the day.
Fresh thinking and better ideas
Space for your team's best thinking to surface, including ideas that might never have come up otherwise.
A record everyone can point at
A written summary of what was decided, who owns it, and by when. Useful when half the group has to brief a site that wasn't in the room.
Client stories
Real teams, real outcomes
These aren't all British Columbia engagements, and we won't pretend otherwise. They're the kinds of sessions we run and the outcomes teams point to afterward.
What our clients say
It was a pleasure to work with Will and Positive Impact. I was both inspired and empowered to co-deliver a meaningful offsite. Their positive incite into leadership performance and emotional resilience gave me clear direction and tactical tools I could apply to my workplace right away. I thoroughly look forward to working with Will again.
- Haley Daniels
Olympian and Motivational Speaker
Thanks for your incredible support, kindness, professionalism, and realness.
It was my sincere pleasure and privilege to work with you on our event.
You are a unique and special human, and I’m grateful that our paths crossed on this project, and look forward to the next time.
- Shauna Grinke, MBA, CPHR
Vice President - People and CultureThe workshop was an incredibly valuable experience for our team — the facilitator created an open, engaging environment that encouraged honest discussion and collaboration. The content was thoughtfully tailored to our team’s specific goals, making the session both relevant and actionable. We’re excited to continue partnering with Positive Impact to build on the great momentum sparked in this session.
- Shannon Charbonneau
Account Director
Treetop Marketing and Promotion Inc.
I’m leaving our session with a sense of optimism that I haven’t had in a while. It was time extremely well spent! I am sure that we all feel much closer and more connected.
- Participant
MDA Geointelligence Engineering Leadership SummitThe environment that was created made me feel comfortable to participate and collaborate with my colleagues. It was very well organized. I liked the outcome of the brainstorm sessions and warmup activities.
- ParticipantThe level of engagement and pace of the training was excellent. Like the fact that this workshop was trainer-guided, but participants lead!
- ParticipantFantastic facilitating most importantly Will understood when to let us talk and when to corral us back on track. Excellent value this afternoon.
- Engagement Workshop Participant
100% Satisfaction Guarantee.
We stand behind the quality of our work with complete confidence. If you're not fully satisfied with the results, we'll make it right.
Your trust matters more to us, and our guarantee acknowledges our belief that you deserve to feel confident in every investment you make with us. That's a standard we hold ourselves to, every time.
Ready to talk about your team?
Get in TouchAround the province
Where sessions happen, and what usually fits
BC is a coast, a set of valleys and a very large north, and organizations operating across all three plan differently because of it. We know these distances personally rather than from a map.
| Region | Organizations based there | Format that usually fits |
|---|---|---|
| Vancouver and the Lower Mainland | Technology, film and creative, ports and logistics, financial and professional services, health authorities, post-secondary | In person, and the deepest pool of meeting space in the province. See our Vancouver facilitator page for more on this market. |
| Victoria and the south Island | Provincial ministries and agencies, technology, post-secondary, health, marine and defence, non-profits | In person. A strong public sector rhythm to the calendar. See our Victoria facilitator page for more. |
| Nanaimo and the central Island | Health and education, municipal bodies, forestry and marine, small and mid-size employers, First Nations organizations | In person. A practical gathering point for organizations working the length of the Island. See our Nanaimo facilitator page for more. |
| Whistler and the Sea to Sky | Offsite and retreat venues within about two hours of Vancouver | Multi-day. The natural choice for a leadership retreat. See our Whistler facilitator page for more. |
| The Interior: Kelowna, Kamloops, the Kootenays | Agriculture and wine, health authorities, post-secondary, forestry, tourism operators, municipal bodies | In person, and comfortably reached without a major travel budget. Seasonal workloads matter in the valleys, so timing the session well is half the work. |
| The north: Prince George, Terrace, Fort St. John | Forestry and resources, energy, health and education, municipal bodies, First Nations governments and organizations | In person for the anchor session, virtual for the follow-ups. Distances are real here, and we build the travel into the scope and say so up front. |
A local detail that matters
In BC, some of your people cannot drive to the meeting
Most provinces are a driving problem. BC is partly a scheduling problem, because a meaningful number of communities here are reachable only by ferry or by air. Health authorities, school districts, First Nations organizations and resource employers all have people in places where attending a meeting is not a question of leaving early.
That changes what an in-person session actually costs. Asking someone from a coastal community to attend a day in Vancouver can mean two nights away and a sailing at either end, so a one-day session costs them three days and they arrive knowing it. Meanwhile the people who drove twenty minutes are wondering why the agenda is so tight.
So hybrid here is a requirement rather than a preference, and it has to be designed properly rather than bolted on. We size small-group work so the remote participants are never outnumbered in every breakout, keep the working blocks shorter than an in-person day would run, and ask early whether the people who travel furthest should be the ones the session is built around. Sometimes the fair answer is two shorter sessions in two places rather than one day in the city.
Featured Workshops
Each of these runs in person, virtually, or as a hybrid, which matters more here than in most provinces.
COMS Communication Styles
COMS is our own communication styles assessment, grounded in research and facilitated by our team. It gives your people a shared way to talk about how they each work, so different styles become an advantage instead of a source of friction.
It's especially useful where a head office on the coast and operations in the Interior or the north have grown different working cultures. What reads as decisive in one place reads as dismissive in another, and without a shared vocabulary that gets filed under personality rather than distance.
Eight questions, one simple grid, and a reference the whole team can point at months later.
Learn more
Strategic Planning
This is where your team gets a real say in shaping and carrying out the organization's direction, landing on initiatives that actually move forward.
A BC plan has to work in a Vancouver boardroom and in a community five hours up a highway. We facilitate the process so the people delivering it in those places help shape it rather than receive it, which is usually the difference between a plan that lands and one that gets politely ignored.
A strategic plan is a living, breathing document. We stay involved as it plays out over the following months and years.
Learn more
5 Dysfunctions of a Team
This session takes a good team and helps make it excellent. We draw on Patrick Lencioni's well-known framework, approached through an appreciative inquiry lens that starts with what's already working.
It works particularly well as a series rather than a single day, which suits distributed teams that cannot easily gather twice in a month. The five behaviours, trust, conflict, commitment, accountability and results, are all on the table, and a team gets to practise between sessions.
Your people walk away with shared language for how they work together, and a plan for moving forward that they built themselves.
Learn more
Our Core Team
Great content is only made better by great facilitators
Will Chambers
Founder & Facilitator
Award-winning facilitator and Founder of Positive Impact, with sessions delivered to tens of thousands of people. Will focuses on strategy, leadership, team dynamics and communication, turning concepts into clear, committed action.
More about Will
Lindsay Davis
Coach & Strategist
Award-winning coach and entrepreneurial guide, with experience spanning rural entrepreneurs in Africa to multimillion-dollar companies. Helps leaders focus on what matters most and build the resilience to anticipate challenges and move through them.
More about LindsayMichael Lorsch
Facilitator & Learning Consultant
Brings facilitation and learning design from theatre stages to executive boardrooms, including in-house work with lululemon. Blends mindfulness, relationship systems and human-centred design to keep people at the centre of every session.
More about Michael
Jason Maraschiello
Coach & Facilitator
Certified life and corporate coach, mindfulness and meditation teacher. Uses mindfulness and effective communication to help people set manageable goals, find work-life balance and build the support to follow through.
More about Jason
For work in British Columbia we assign one lead facilitator who travels for the session and stays with you through the follow-up, rather than handing you to a different person each time. Beyond the core team, we draw on a wider network of facilitators and subject-matter experts, matched to the goals, sector, and people of each engagement.
Looking for a specific market
BC pages and related reading
Two market pages and four guides that answer the questions most teams have before a first session.
- Market page Facilitation in Vancouver Read the guide
- Home market Facilitation in Victoria Read the guide
- Market page Facilitation in Nanaimo Read the guide
- Retreats Facilitation in Whistler Read the guide
- Getting ready How to prepare your team for a facilitated session Read the guide
- Honest advice When not to hire a facilitator, and what to do instead Read the guide
Frequently Asked Questions
Facilitation in British Columbia
Are your facilitators based in British Columbia?
We don't publish where our facilitators are based, and we'd rather be straightforward about that than vague. What matters for your engagement is that we work across British Columbia regularly, in the Pacific time zone, and that travel is always quoted as a separate line item so you can see exactly what it adds.
Does the facilitator need to know BC to run our session?
Less than you'd think, and we'd rather say so. Your team knows the province, the sector and the history far better than any facilitator will. What travels is the craft: someone neutral who owns the process so your people can own the content. The local knowledge that actually decides whether a session is good is already in the room.
Should I be looking at this page or a city page?
If your team sits in one market, go to that market's page. We have separate pages for Vancouver, Victoria, Nanaimo and Whistler, and each goes into more detail on the sectors and rhythms there. This page is for organizations whose footprint is the province: multi-site employers, provincial associations, health authorities, First Nations organizations, and public sector bodies whose people are spread from the Island to the northeast.
Can you work in the Interior and the north?
Yes, and those regions don't have pages of their own, so this is where they're covered. Kelowna, Kamloops and the Kootenays are comfortably reached without a major travel budget. Prince George, Terrace and the northeast involve real distance, so we usually suggest an in-person anchor session with virtual follow-ups, and we build the travel into the scope and say so up front rather than burying it.
What kinds of organizations do you work with here?
Leadership teams, boards, and departments across private, public, and non-profit organizations. In BC that tends to mean technology, film and creative, ports and logistics, forestry and resources, health authorities, post-secondary institutions, provincial ministries and agencies, municipalities, First Nations governments and organizations, and tourism operators. Group size ranges from an executive team of eight to a leadership summit of sixty.
How does travel affect what a session costs?
Travel is quoted as a separate line item, so you can see exactly what it adds. Within the Lower Mainland and the south Island it is modest. The Interior adds a drive or a short flight. The north involves real distance, and we tell you that plainly and build it into the scope rather than burying it.
How far ahead should we book?
Six to eight weeks is comfortable for an in-person session. That window covers a discovery call, a session design built around your goals rather than a template, and any pre-work such as an anonymous survey or interviews. Multi-day retreat venues in the Sea to Sky and the Island book up considerably further out, so start earlier if you want a specific place.
What does our team actually walk away with?
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.
Let's talk about your team
Tell us what you're working through and where in the province your people are, and we'll tell you honestly whether facilitation is the right tool and what the session should look like.
Get in Touch
