Edmonton Facilitator
Facilitated planning, leadership and team sessions for organizations in Edmonton and the Capital Region.
We create sessions that are greater than the sum of their parts, guided by award-winning facilitators.
- 110,000+people facilitated globally
- Award-winningfacilitators
- Edmonton and areain 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
Edmonton & the Capital Region
Facilitation for Edmonton teams
Positive Impact facilitates strategic planning, leadership development, team retreats, and change management for organizations in Edmonton and the Capital Region. Edmonton rooms often hold government, health, post-secondary and industry at the same table, and those four worlds do not mean the same thing by the word decision.
We won’t tell you we have an Edmonton office, because we don’t. What we bring is the facilitation craft: someone neutral who owns the process so your people can own the content. If your footprint is the whole province, our Alberta page covers multi-region work, and we have a separate page for Calgary.
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
Planning inside a mandate is different from planning without one. We facilitate the process so a group is clear about which decisions are genuinely theirs to make, and puts its energy there rather than into the ones that are already settled elsewhere.
Learn moreCommunication Training & COMS
Our own communication styles framework, giving teams a common language for how they each work. Useful where a policy team, a clinical team and an operations team have to agree, and each is fluent in a different dialect of the same language.
Learn moreTeam Development & Team Building
Retreats, offsites and tailored sessions that build the trust and psychological safety strong teams depend on. Worth timing around the winter, since a January offsite asks a good deal more of everyone’s travel than a September one.
Culture & Engagement
From vision and values work to culture shifts, we help turn shared purpose into commitments people live by, including in organizations where the mandate changed and the culture is still catching up.
Leadership Development & Executive Coaching
Hands-on coaching and development for managers and executives, aimed at building clarity and confidence in how they lead. Often clinicians, engineers or policy specialists who now lead the people doing the work they used to do.
Corporate Training
Participant-led training designed around your people, with tools that stay useful long after the session ends. Delivered downtown, out in the Capital Region, or across sites when your teams are shift-based.
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 often means being explicit about authority before anything else, because a room full of capable people with unclear decision rights will discuss beautifully and commit to nothing. Facilitator-guided, participant-led, and clear from the outset about what this group can actually settle.
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 who in your organization can actually approve the outcome.
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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 disagree properly in the room rather than agreeing politely and escalating afterwards.
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 Alberta 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
Most Edmonton work sits in the city itself, but the Capital Region runs well past it, and the industrial sites east of town keep their own hours.
| Region | Organizations based there | Format that usually fits |
|---|---|---|
| Downtown and the Legislature area | Provincial ministries and agencies, Crown bodies, professional services, associations, financial services | In person. Most mandate-level sessions land here, and it is walkable for anyone already downtown. |
| University and health sciences district | Post-secondary and research, health networks and clinical teams, spin-out technology | In person, and worth choosing when clinicians are in the group. Being close to the wards is the difference between attending and half-attending. |
| South Edmonton, Ellerslie and the airport corridor | Distribution and logistics, manufacturing, technology, energy services | In person. Easy for anyone flying in, easy parking, and closer than downtown for a lot of shift-based teams. |
| Sherwood Park, Fort Saskatchewan and the Industrial Heartland | Petrochemical and refining operations, contractors and trades employers, municipal teams | In person, planned around shift patterns and turnaround schedules rather than the office calendar. |
| St. Albert, Leduc, Spruce Grove and the wider region | Municipal bodies, health and education, small and mid-size manufacturers, professional services | In person, and often a friendlier drive for a regional group than asking everyone into the city core. |
A local detail that matters
The first question in an Edmonton room is who can actually decide
Edmonton holds an unusual concentration of organizations whose authority is defined by someone else: ministries and agencies working to a mandate, health and post-secondary bodies with boards and funders, and industrial operations answering to owners elsewhere. A room can be full of senior, capable people and still not contain the authority to settle the thing it is discussing.
When that goes unnamed, the day looks productive and produces nothing. The conversation is thoughtful, the flip charts fill up, and then everything lands in a category nobody in the room can move. People leave with the sense that it was a good discussion, which is the politest way a session can fail.
So we sort it before the agenda is written. In discovery we ask what this group can decide on its own, what it can recommend, and what is already settled elsewhere, then we design the day around the first two and stop pretending about the third. Sessions here often produce two outputs rather than one: the decisions taken, and the specific asks going up with a named owner attached to each.
Featured Workshops
Each of these runs in person, virtually, or as a hybrid, which matters when part of your group is downtown and part is on shift east of the city.
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 particularly useful where several professional cultures meet. A policy specialist, a clinician and a plant manager will each read the same email differently, and without a shared vocabulary that difference gets filed under personality rather than training.
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.
Planning inside a mandate is different from planning without one. We facilitate the process so a group is clear about which decisions are genuinely theirs, and spends its day on those rather than relitigating what has already been settled somewhere else.
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 lands well with leadership groups where disagreement has learned to travel upward instead of across. Escalating is not the same as resolving, and the difference shows up in how quickly a team can settle something itself. The five behaviours, trust, conflict, commitment, accountability and results, are all on the table.
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 Edmonton 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.
Before you book
Worth reading first
Six pieces that answer the questions most teams have before a first session.
- Wider footprint Facilitation across Alberta Read the guide
- Market page Facilitation in Calgary 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
- Strategic planning Why organize a strategic planning session Read the guide
- Afterwards Keeping momentum after the session ends Read the guide
Frequently Asked Questions
Facilitation in Edmonton
Are your facilitators based in Edmonton?
No. Positive Impact is based in Victoria, BC, and our facilitators travel to Edmonton for in-person work. It’s one of the shorter trips we make, which keeps the travel line modest. Arriving without a history with anyone in the group is often the more useful half of being an outsider, particularly in a city where a lot of senior people have worked together before in a different organization.
Our group can discuss but not decide. Is a facilitated session still worth it?
Yes, if the day is designed for that honestly. A room that can recommend but not approve should spend its time producing a clear, well-argued recommendation with the trade-offs named, not pretending it can settle the matter. We sort this in discovery: what this group can decide, what it can recommend, and what is already settled elsewhere. Sessions here often produce two outputs, the decisions taken and the specific asks going up with an owner on each.
We have government, clinical and operations people in one room. How do you handle that?
By treating it as a translation problem rather than a personality one. Those groups are trained differently and use the same words to mean different things, so we get definitions on the table early rather than discovering the mismatch at hour four. Small-group work is mixed deliberately so people hear how another function frames the same issue, and we write decisions in language all three can act on rather than in the dialect of whoever held the pen.
Can you work with teams on shift or in the Industrial Heartland?
Yes, and the schedule leads rather than follows. Shift patterns and turnaround windows decide the date more than anyone’s calendar does, so tell us early and we’ll design around them. That sometimes means two shorter sessions covering both crews instead of one long day, or an early start that suits the site rather than the office. It’s a design question, not a logistics afterthought.
What kinds of organizations do you work with here?
Leadership teams, boards, and departments across public, private, and non-profit organizations. In Edmonton that tends to mean provincial ministries and agencies, health networks and clinical teams, post-secondary and research institutions, petrochemical and industrial operations and their contractors, construction, technology, municipalities, and associations. 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. Edmonton is a short flight from the west coast, which makes it one of the cheaper in-person markets we work in. If you have something in Calgary too, a second session in the same week costs far less than a second trip. Virtual sessions carry no travel cost at all.
How far ahead should we book?
Six to eight weeks is comfortable for an in-person session. 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. Public sector calendars have their own rhythm around budget and reporting cycles, so tell us yours early and we’ll design around it. Winter travel is worth a little extra margin.
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 who needs to be in the room, and we’ll tell you honestly whether facilitation is the right tool and what a session in Edmonton would look like.
Get in Touch
