Vancouver Facilitation Services
Facilitated strategic planning, team development and change sessions for Vancouver organizations.
We create sessions that are greater than the sum of their parts, guided by award-winning facilitators.
- 110,000+people facilitated globally
- Award-winningfacilitators
- Hybrid by designin 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
Calgary
Facilitation services for Vancouver organizations
The Vancouver teams that call us are rarely all in one place. Some people are downtown, some are in Surrey or the valley, one is in Seattle, two are permanently remote, and the last time the whole group was in a room together nobody can quite remember. That is the normal case here rather than the awkward exception, and it changes how a session has to be built. This page sets out the formats, how each one is designed, and what you have in writing afterwards.
Sessions run half-day, full-day or multi-day, in person, virtually or as a hybrid, and every one is designed around your goals rather than pulled off a shelf. If what you're weighing up is who would run it rather than what it involves, our Vancouver facilitator page covers the people and how we assign them.
Session types
The sessions we run most often
Each runs half-day, full-day or multi-day, in person, virtually or as a hybrid.
Strategic planning sessions
Multi-year planning for boards, executive teams and departments, designed so the people joining remotely shape the priorities rather than watching them being set. The output is a short list with owners and dates, not a document that gets filed.
Learn moreCOMS communication workshops
Our COMS communication styles assessment, delivered as a half-day or full-day workshop. It earns its keep fastest on distributed teams, where tone gets misread over text and small frictions calcify before anyone is in the same room to sort them out.
Learn moreLeadership offsites and retreats
Multi-day offsites for leadership groups, often up the Sea to Sky or on the Island. Usually the only time in the year the whole group is physically together, which is an argument for protecting the unstructured hours rather than filling them.
Vision, values and culture
Vision, values and culture sessions that end in observable commitments rather than adjectives. If the output could be printed on a mug, we haven't finished the session.
Change and restructuring
Change and restructuring sessions, run when the org chart has moved and the working relationships haven't caught up. Harder on a distributed team, because the corridor conversation that would normally surface the worry never happens.
Board and governance sessions
Board and governance sessions, including annual planning and board effectiveness work. Shorter, tighter and built around the fact that directors are giving up a Saturday, some of them from out of town.
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 the people who aren't in the room as carefully as for the people who are: shorter working blocks, structured turn-taking, small groups sized so remote participants are never outnumbered, and a decision log kept live where everyone can see it. Facilitator-guided, participant-led, and documented as it happens rather than reconstructed later.
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, where everyone actually is, and what has to be true by the end of the day.
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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 Vancouver 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 TouchWhat you get
Which format fits which situation
Most people arrive knowing the problem and not the format. This is roughly how we'd steer you, and we'd rather talk you down to something smaller than sell you a day you don't need.
| If this is your situation | The format that usually fits | Why |
|---|---|---|
| One decision is stuck and the group keeps circling it | A half-day working session, usually virtual | A single clear question does not need a full day, and it certainly does not need a venue. Bringing people across the region for ninety minutes of real content is what gives offsites a bad name. |
| Annual or multi-year planning | A full day in person, with pre-work | Prioritizing means somebody's idea loses, and groups will not do that in a rush or on a screen. The pre-work does the information gathering so the day can be spent on the choosing. |
| The team has never all been in a room together | A multi-day offsite | Trust is built in the unstructured hours, and a distributed team has none of them by default. This is the one situation where the venue is doing real work rather than being a perk. |
| Restructuring, or two groups becoming one | A full day in person, then a shorter virtual follow-up six weeks later | The first session surfaces what people are actually worried about. The second checks whether anything changed, which is when a group finds out if the first one was real. |
| Communication keeps breaking down between the same people | A COMS half-day, virtual or in person | This is a vocabulary problem more often than a personality one, and it responds to a shared framework rather than a long conversation about behaviour. |
| You want development to actually stick | An ongoing partnership, mostly virtual | One day a year restarts from scratch every time. Quarterly sessions with the same facilitator compound, and the group practises between them. |
A local detail that matters
Designing for the people who aren't in the room
Most Vancouver sessions are hybrid whether anyone planned them that way or not. Someone is in Seattle, someone is working from the valley that day, someone has a flight. And hybrid done badly is worse than either alternative, because the people in the room have a good day and the people on the screen quietly stop contributing about ninety minutes in.
The mechanism is simple enough. Remote participants can't read the room, can't catch the side comment that reframes the discussion, and can't interrupt without it costing more than it does for someone sitting at the table. So they wait, then they stop trying, and by the afternoon the session has quietly become an in-person session with an audience.
So we design the other way round, starting from the remote experience. Working blocks are shorter than an in-person day would run, because attention on a screen is not the same resource. Small groups are sized so remote people are never the minority in a breakout, which usually means mixing rather than putting the room in one group and the screen in another. Input is written first, so views are committed before anyone can read the room. The decision log is on screen where everyone can see it, not on a wall visible to half the participants. And if the group genuinely needs to be together, we will say so and tell you it should be a multi-day rather than pretending a hybrid day will do the same job.
Featured Workshops
Three of the sessions Vancouver organizations ask for most, each available in any of the formats above.
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, and one of the few sessions that works genuinely well fully virtual. Eight questions, one grid the whole team can reference afterwards, and practical ways to work through the misreads that keep recurring over text.
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.
Usually a full day in person with pre-work, because prioritizing is the part groups avoid and they will not do it in a rush. The session ends with a short list the group will defend, not a long list it nodded at.
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 the session that benefits most from being in person, because trust is the behaviour that distributed teams lose first. The five behaviours, trust, conflict, commitment, accountability and results, are worked through with your real situations rather than case studies.
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. More on how we assign them, and how to assess any facilitator, is on our Vancouver facilitator page. 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.
- The people Who would run your Vancouver session Read the guide
- Hybrid sessions Making mixed in-person and remote sessions work 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
- Measurement How to measure the success of a facilitation session Read the guide
- Wider footprint Facilitation across British Columbia Read the guide
Frequently Asked Questions
How our Vancouver sessions work
Half our team is remote. Can a session still work?
Yes, but only if it's designed for that from the start rather than adapted on the day. Hybrid done badly is worse than either alternative: the people in the room have a good session and the people on screen quietly stop contributing about ninety minutes in. They can't read the room, can't catch the side comment that reframes the discussion, and can't interrupt without it costing them more than it costs someone at the table. So we design from the remote experience outwards.
What does that actually change about the day?
Four things, mainly. Working blocks are shorter, because attention on a screen isn't the same resource as attention in a room. Small groups are mixed rather than room-versus-screen, and sized so remote people are never the minority in a breakout. Input is written first, so views are committed before anyone can read the room. And the decision log lives on screen where everyone can see it, not on a wall that half the participants can't.
Which format should we book?
Depends on the situation more than the budget, and the table above is roughly how we'd steer you. One stuck decision needs a half-day and probably no venue at all. Annual planning needs a full day in person with pre-work, because prioritizing is the part groups avoid and they won't do it in a rush. A team that has never all been in a room together needs a multi-day, which is the one case where the venue is doing real work.
What do we actually have in writing afterwards?
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: a plan on a page, an agreed set of priorities, or shared language for how the team communicates. Multi-day sessions usually add 30, 60 and 90 day commitments with named owners. It lands within a few days, while people still remember why they agreed to things.
Do you bring the content or do we?
You do. We guide the process and never the content, which is the actual definition of facilitation and the thing that separates it from consulting. Your team knows the business, the market and the history. Our job is to build the conditions where that knowledge gets used, and to stop the session drifting toward whatever is most comfortable to discuss.
What preparation is involved on our side?
A discovery call, and usually some pre-work. That might be an anonymous survey, a handful of short interviews, or a pre-read so nobody spends the first hour getting oriented. The heavier the pre-work, the more the session day can spend on the difficult conversation rather than on context. We'll tell you what's worth doing and what isn't for the outcome you've described.
Where should we hold an in-person session?
Wherever costs your group the least commuting, which in Metro Vancouver is often not downtown. Burnaby and the Tri-Cities are frequently the fairest compromise for a regional group, Richmond makes sense when anyone is flying in, and the valley is worth considering when most of your team already lives out there. For a multi-day, the Sea to Sky corridor or the Island are both close enough to be practical.
How far ahead should we book?
Six to eight weeks is comfortable for an in-person session. That covers the discovery call, a session design built around your goals rather than a template, and the pre-work. Retreat venues up the Sea to Sky book up considerably further out, so if you want specific dates for a multi-day, start earlier. Virtual sessions can move faster than that.
Let's talk about your team
Tell us what you're working through and what has to be true by the end of the day, 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
