Change Management Facilitation
Facilitated sessions for organizations going through a restructure, a merger, a system change or a shift in direction.
We create sessions that are greater than the sum of their parts, guided by award-winning facilitators.
- 110,000+people facilitated globally
- Award-winningfacilitators
- Announced to adoptedin 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
Change management
Facilitated sessions for organizations in the middle of a change
Most organizations call us at the same moment: the change has been announced, the reaction was quieter than expected, and nobody is certain whether that quiet is acceptance or something else. Facilitation does real work at that point. It does not do the work most people first ask for, which is to make a decision popular after the fact.
So we start by separating what is genuinely fixed from what is genuinely still open, and we put the whole session on the second list. A room can tell the difference within about twenty minutes, and a session that pretends everything is open when it is not spends the rest of the day paying for that. Sessions run half-day, full-day or multi-day, in person, virtually or as a hybrid.
Situations
What we get called in for
Six versions of the same underlying problem: the decision is made and the people are not yet with it.
A restructure has been announced
The org chart moved and the working relationships have not caught up. People are waiting to see who now decides what, and in the meantime very little is being decided at all. The session's job is to make the new lines explicit and get them agreed out loud.
Learn moreTwo groups have to become one
After a merger or an amalgamation, both sides usually agree on the strategy and disagree about how things get done. That difference is rarely discussed directly, because raising it sounds like defending your old employer.
Learn moreA new system or process is landing
The technology or the process is decided and adoption is the hard part. The people who will use it daily generally know exactly why it will not work as designed, and have often stopped saying so.
A change in direction or mandate
The organization is doing something materially different from what it did, and the culture is still optimized for the old thing. This one needs longer than a day and usually more than one session.
Change fatigue
This is the third or fourth reorganization in five years and people have learned to wait it out. That is a rational response rather than resistance, and a session that treats it as an attitude problem makes it worse.
A leadership transition
A founder steps back, a long-serving leader retires, or a new executive arrives from outside. The change is a person rather than a process, which makes it harder to talk about and easier to avoid.
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.
In change work that means being scrupulous about the boundary between what is settled and what is not, because the session's whole credibility rests on it. Facilitator-guided, participant-led, and honest from the first minute about which conversation this actually is.
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 the change, where it currently sits, and what is genuinely still open for the group to influence.
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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 a group put the real disagreement on the table while there is still time in the agenda to work it through.
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 change engagements, and we won't pretend otherwise. They're the kinds of sessions we run and the outcomes teams point to afterward. 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 TouchWhere it helps
Where facilitation helps in a change, and where it does not
Timing changes what a session can achieve more than anything else does. The last column is the one worth reading, because most disappointment with change facilitation comes from booking it at the wrong point.
| Where the change is | What a session can do | What it cannot do |
|---|---|---|
| Before the decision is made | Surface the options properly, test them against what the people closest to the work know, and help the group choose with the trade-offs named out loud. | Nothing much yet. This is the best moment to bring us in and the one we are asked for least. |
| Decided, not yet announced | Work out how it lands: what gets said, in what order, to whom, and which questions need answers before it goes out. | Change the decision. If leadership will not move on it, the session designs the delivery rather than the choice. |
| Announced, reaction unclear | Find out what people actually think, using anonymous input rather than a show of hands, and separate what is fixed from what is still open. | Manufacture enthusiasm. If the answer is that people think it is a poor decision, we will tell you that. |
| In implementation, stalling | Name what is actually blocking it, which is usually unclear decision rights or a design flaw the people using it spotted months ago. | Fix a resourcing problem. If it is stalling because nobody has time, that is a scheduling decision rather than a facilitation one. |
| Done on paper, not in practice | Get the group to agree what the new way of working looks like day to day, with owners, dates and a check-in that actually happens. | Substitute for leadership follow-through. A session produces the commitments; somebody has to hold people to them afterwards. |
A local detail that matters
The one question to settle before the agenda is written
What is genuinely fixed, and what is genuinely still open. Everything else in a change session follows from the answer, and it is the question most likely to have been avoided before we are called.
The temptation is to keep it vague, because vagueness feels more inclusive. It is not. A group invited to shape something that was decided last quarter works this out inside twenty minutes, and what it learns is that the consultation was decorative. That costs more trust than the original decision ever did, and it is why so many people arrive at a change session already switched off.
So we ask it directly in discovery and push until the answer is specific. The structure is fixed but the reporting lines within it are open. The system is chosen but how it gets rolled out is not. The direction is set but what we stop doing to make room for it is genuinely undecided. Then we say all of that out loud in the first ten minutes of the session and spend the day entirely on the open list. Groups are markedly more willing to engage with a narrow real choice than a wide fictional one. And if it turns out nothing is open, we will say the session should not happen and suggest a straightforward briefing instead. We would rather lose the booking than run the version everyone in the room can see through.
Featured Workshops
Three sessions that do a lot of the work in a change, each available half-day, full-day or multi-day.
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.
Delivered as a half-day or full-day workshop. Eight questions, one grid the whole team can reference afterwards, and practical ways to work through the misreads that keep recurring between the same two people.
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.
During a change, planning does one specific job: it says what the organization is stopping in order to make room for the new thing. Most changes fail on that rather than on the change itself, because nothing was taken off anyone's plate.
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.
Usually a full day, and often the session that follows a planning day rather than precedes it. The five behaviours, trust, conflict, commitment, accountability and results, are worked through with your real situations rather than case studies, and the output is a set of agreed working commitments.
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
Every session is led by one of the facilitators below, who runs the discovery, the design, the day itself and the follow-up. Change work in particular benefits from one person carrying the context across a series rather than a fresh face 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.
Before you book
Worth reading first
Six pieces that answer the questions most teams have before a first session.
- Honest advice When not to hire a facilitator, and what to do instead Read the guide
- Getting ready How to prepare your team for a facilitated session Read the guide
- Afterwards Keeping momentum after the session ends Read the guide
- Team stages Everything you need to know about the Tuckman model Read the guide
- Measurement How to measure the success of a facilitation session Read the guide
- Workshop COMS communication styles Read the guide
Frequently Asked Questions
Change management facilitation
The decision is already made. Can you still help?
Yes, but not by pretending it isn't. A session designed to make a settled decision popular gets read for what it is within about twenty minutes, and it costs more trust than the original decision did. What we can do is separate what is genuinely fixed from what is genuinely still open, say both out loud at the start, and spend the day entirely on the open list. Groups engage far more willingly with a narrow real choice than a wide fictional one.
What if nothing is actually open?
Then we'll tell you the session shouldn't happen and suggest a straightforward briefing instead. That's a real conversation we have, and we'd rather lose the booking than run the version everyone in the room can see through. It's also usually a sign the request is a communications problem rather than a facilitation one, which is a cheaper thing to fix.
When in a change should we bring a facilitator in?
Earlier than most people do. The most useful moment is before the decision is final, when the options can still be tested against what the people closest to the work know. That's also the moment we're asked for least. The next best is decided but not yet announced, when the session can shape how it lands. After the announcement is still workable, but the range of what a session can achieve narrows each week.
Our people have been through several reorganizations. They've stopped engaging.
That's a rational response rather than resistance, and it matters that the session treats it that way. People who have waited out three reorganizations have learned that engaging costs effort and changes nothing. A session that frames that as an attitude problem confirms the lesson. What works is being specific about what is different this time, and if nothing is different, being honest about that too.
How do you find out what people really think?
Anonymous written input, before any discussion. In a change, a show of hands tells you almost nothing, because the cost of dissenting in front of the person who announced the change is obvious to everyone. What comes back anonymously is usually already widely known and simply unsaid, and putting it on the table is most of the value of the session.
What does a change session actually produce?
A written summary with the decisions made, the commitments people made out loud, and who owns what by when. Change work usually also produces something specific: an agreed statement of what is fixed and what is open, the design flaws the group identified while there is still time to act on them, and a list of what the organization is stopping to make room for the new thing. That last one is where most changes fail.
Can facilitation fix a change that's stalling?
Sometimes, and it depends what is blocking it. If it is unclear decision rights or a design flaw people spotted months ago and stopped mentioning, a session gets that on the table quickly. If it is stalling because nobody has time, that is a resourcing decision rather than a facilitation problem, and we will say so rather than run a day that cannot address it.
How many sessions does a change usually take?
More than one, and that's worth planning for at the outset. A single session can surface what is happening and produce commitments. Whether anything changed is only visible six to eight weeks later, which is why we often suggest a shorter follow-up session at that point. It is also when a group finds out whether the first session was real.
Let's talk about your team
Tell us what the change is, where it currently sits, and what is genuinely still open, and we'll tell you honestly whether facilitation is the right tool and how the session would be designed and what it would produce.
Get in Touch
