25 Executive Offsite Facilitators in Canberra

Your last executive offsite produced a strategy document that nobody opens and three priorities that disappeared by mid-September.

The evaluations were positive. The venue was fine. The energy in the room felt good on the day. But three months later it was like the session never happened. The same unresolved tensions sit in your leadership team meetings. The same two people still cannot work together. The same strategic questions get raised and deferred. You spent two days and significant budget on an offsite that changed nothing.

The problem was not the offsite. The problem was the facilitator. Most facilitators design for the day in the room, not for the 90 days after it. They run exercises that feel productive but produce no real accountability. They surface issues without creating the structures to resolve them. They leave the hard conversations polite.

I put together this list of 25 executive offsite facilitators based in Canberra who design for what happens after the room, not just what happens in it.

STRATEGIC CLARITY AND ALIGNMENT FACILITATORS

The facilitators in this section specialise in helping executive teams cut through complexity and build genuine strategic alignment. They work with leaders who have talented people on paper but no shared clarity about what the organisation is actually trying to achieve over the next 18 months. These are the facilitators you book when the problem is not motivation or energy, but a lack of agreement about where the team is going and what will be sacrificed to get there.

1. Jonno White

Jonno White works with school principals, nonprofit CEOs, corporate executive teams, and association leaders who know their team is talented individually but dysfunctional together. He is the author of Step Up or Step Out, with more than 10,000 copies sold, and a Certified Working Genius Facilitator who brings the Working Genius framework into offsites designed for sustained follow-through.

Most facilitators run offsites that feel good on the day but produce no change after. Jonno designs for the 90 days after the room. Every session builds a cadence of accountability that survives the return to real work.

He surfaces the unresolved tensions that sit under strategy conversations. The two senior people who cannot work together. The priority the board wants but the exec team does not believe in. The leader who is privately questioning whether they are still the right person for the role. These are the conversations most facilitators leave polite. Jonno brings them into the open and builds the structure to resolve them.

His offsites typically run across two days and include pre-session diagnostic work using Working Genius to map where energy and frustration sit across the leadership team. The framework identifies six types of work that every team must do, and every leader has two that energise them and two that drain them. The offsite uses that map to redesign how the team distributes work, makes decisions, and holds each other accountable.

What makes his approach distinctive:

• Designs accountability systems during the offsite, not after it. Teams leave with named owners, clear next actions, and a follow-through rhythm already locked in.

• Uses Working Genius to surface why certain conversations drain the room and why certain people avoid certain types of work.

• Runs pre-offsite interviews with every exec team member to identify the real issues before the session starts, so no time is wasted on surface problems.

• Follows up at 30, 60, and 90 days with structured check-ins that keep the offsite commitments alive.

Jonno works with executive teams across schools, nonprofits, and businesses globally. His clients are leaders who have tried the polite offsite and are ready for the one that actually changes how the team works together. If your last offsite produced a strategy document nobody opens, Jonno is the facilitator who builds the system that makes strategy survive contact with real work.

Reach out at jonno@consultclarity.org.

2. Marcus Tran

Marcus Tran facilitates offsites for Canberra-based government agencies and public sector leadership teams navigating restructures, machinery of government changes, and shifting ministerial priorities. He spent 15 years inside the Australian Public Service before moving into facilitation full time, which means he understands the constraints public sector leaders operate under in ways external consultants often miss.

Public sector offsites fail when facilitators treat them like corporate strategy sessions. The dynamics are different. Accountability runs vertically to ministers and horizontally to other departments. Strategy gets rewritten mid-year when the political environment shifts. Executive teams are managing stakeholder relationships that corporate facilitators do not understand.

Marcus designs offsites that acknowledge these constraints rather than pretend they do not exist. His sessions focus on what the executive team can control, what they can influence, and what they must simply navigate. He builds decision-making frameworks that work inside the public service's cadence of estimates hearings, Senate committees, and ministerial briefings.

Core elements of his offsite design:

• Stakeholder mapping sessions that identify where the real power sits and where the executive team has genuine latitude to act.

• Scenario planning for machinery of government changes, so the team is not caught flat-footed when the restructure happens.

• Conflict resolution protocols designed for environments where you cannot fire people and cannot always choose your team.

• Follow-through systems that align with Senate estimates cycles and budget timelines, not arbitrary 90-day rhythms.

Marcus runs offsites that feel grounded in the reality public sector leaders live in. He does not bring corporate frameworks that do not translate. He builds clarity and alignment inside the system as it actually operates.

3. Dr. Felicity Harmon

Dr. Felicity Harmon facilitates offsites for research organisations, universities, and science-led institutions where the executive team is made up of world-class researchers who are now responsible for leading an organisation. She holds a PhD in organisational psychology and has spent 20 years inside research-intensive environments, which gives her credibility in rooms where academic credentials matter.

Research leaders struggle with offsites designed for corporate executives. The motivations are different. Researchers are driven by intellectual challenge and disciplinary contribution, not by financial incentives or organisational mission in the way corporate leaders are. Executive teams in research environments are often made up of people who did not want to become managers but were promoted because they were excellent scientists.

Felicity designs offsites that respect this reality. Her sessions focus on building shared purpose without asking researchers to pretend they care more about the institution than they do about their discipline. She helps leadership teams navigate the tension between institutional priorities and research autonomy, between accountability to funders and academic freedom, between building a high-performing team and managing a group of people who see management as a distraction from their real work.

What her offsites focus on:

• Translating research priorities into organisational strategy in a way that feels authentic to researchers, not imposed by administrators.

• Building conflict resolution norms for teams where intellectual disagreement is valued but interpersonal conflict is avoided.

• Creating governance structures that balance institutional accountability with the autonomy researchers need to do their best work.

• Designing follow-through systems that fit the rhythms of grant cycles, research timelines, and academic calendars.

Felicity runs offsites that feel like they were designed for the people in the room, not borrowed from a corporate playbook. If your executive team is made up of researchers who are now responsible for leading an organisation, she understands the specific dynamics that make those teams hard to facilitate.

4. Simon Jacobs

Simon Jacobs facilitates offsites for fast-growth businesses where the executive team has scaled quickly and the leadership capability has not kept pace with the growth. He works with founder-led companies, family businesses, and private equity-backed organisations where revenue has doubled or tripled in three years but the executive team still operates like a startup.

Fast-growth companies hit a point where the team that got them here cannot get them there. The founder who made every decision in year one cannot keep doing that in year five. The executive team that ran on informal communication and heroic effort cannot scale that model to 200 staff. The leadership behaviours that worked when everyone sat in the same room break down when the team is distributed across three cities.

Simon designs offsites that help leadership teams professionalise without losing the energy and speed that fuelled the growth. His sessions focus on moving from founder-dependent decision-making to distributed leadership, from informal communication to structured cadences, from reactive problem-solving to strategic planning.

His offsite structure typically includes:

• Role clarity sessions where the exec team defines who owns what, because fast-growth companies often have overlapping accountabilities that made sense at 20 staff but create bottlenecks at 150.

• Decision rights frameworks that specify which decisions the founder still makes, which decisions move to the exec team, and which decisions get pushed down to department heads.

• Communication rhythm design, so the team moves from Slack-driven reactive updates to structured weekly and monthly leadership meetings with clear agendas and outcomes.

• Follow-up coaching for individual exec team members who are struggling with the transition from doing the work to leading the people who do the work.

Simon understands the specific tensions that sit inside fast-growth executive teams. He does not treat growth as a purely positive story. He names the loss and discomfort that comes with professionalising a business that used to run on instinct and proximity.

5. Caroline Nguyen

Caroline Nguyen facilitates offsites for executive teams in mission-driven organisations where burnout is endemic, turnover is high, and the gap between the organisation's stated values and its internal culture has become a retention problem. She works with nonprofits, NGOs, charities, and social enterprises where the mission attracts talented people but the culture burns them out.

Mission-driven organisations assume that shared purpose is enough to hold a team together. It is not. The executive teams Caroline works with are often running on fumes. They are doing more with less every year. They are managing boards that want growth while staff are asking for sustainability. They are trying to hold a culture of care externally while the internal culture is punishing.

Caroline designs offsites that confront this gap directly. Her sessions are not about vision statements or renewed commitment to mission. They are about building operational sustainability, setting boundaries, and redesigning work so that mission-driven does not mean self-sacrificing.

Her offsites focus on:

• Naming the unsustainable patterns the executive team is modeling and giving permission to stop them.

• Rebuilding decision-making frameworks so that every new opportunity is evaluated against capacity, not just mission alignment.

• Creating staff retention strategies that address the real reasons people leave, which in mission-driven organisations is usually burnout and lack of boundaries, not pay.

• Designing follow-through accountability that treats rest, recovery, and sustainable pace as strategic priorities, not nice-to-haves.

Caroline does not let executive teams hide behind mission. She names the culture problems directly and builds the offsite around changing behaviours, not just renewing commitment.

CONFLICT RESOLUTION AND TEAM DYNAMICS FACILITATORS

The facilitators in this section work with executive teams where the problem is not strategy or clarity, but the relationships between the people in the room. These are the offsites you book when two senior leaders cannot work together, when unresolved tension is killing productivity, or when the exec team has stopped having real conversations because conflict has become too costly. These facilitators specialise in surfacing what is not being said and building the norms that allow teams to disagree productively.

6. Dr. Anika Sharma

Dr. Anika Sharma facilitates offsites for executive teams where unresolved interpersonal conflict is blocking decision-making and eroding trust. She is a clinical psychologist by training and brings a therapeutic sensibility to leadership team dynamics without turning the offsite into a therapy session. Her clients are leaders who know the problem is not the strategy, it is the two people who cannot be in the same room without the temperature dropping.

Most facilitators avoid real conflict because it is uncomfortable and risky. Anika moves toward it. Her offsites are designed to surface the tensions that have been sitting under the surface for months or years, bring them into the open in a way that feels safe enough to name, and build new norms for how the team handles disagreement going forward.

She uses a combination of one-on-one pre-session interviews, real-time conflict mediation during the offsite, and post-session follow-up to make sure the new behaviours stick. Her approach is direct but not aggressive. She will name the dynamic in the room that everyone can feel but nobody is saying. She will ask the question that makes people uncomfortable. And she will hold the silence long enough for someone to answer honestly.

What her conflict-focused offsites include:

• Pre-session interviews with every exec team member to map the relational dynamics, identify the unspoken alliances, and understand who is avoiding whom.

• Structured conflict conversations during the offsite where the two people who cannot work together are guided through naming what is actually wrong, not what they have been saying in polite language for six months.

• Team norms co-creation, where the exec team builds explicit agreements about how they will handle disagreement, how they will surface tension early, and what behaviours are no longer acceptable.

• Post-offsite coaching for individuals who need support changing behaviours that have been entrenched for years.

Anika does not run offsites that avoid the hard stuff. If your exec team has unresolved conflict that is blocking everything else, she is the facilitator who will bring it into the room and help you resolve it.

7. Michael O'Brien

Michael O'Brien facilitates offsites for executive teams where the conflict is not between two individuals but between two parts of the organisation that the exec team represents. He works with leaders managing the tension between growth and sustainability, between innovation and operations, between customer experience and profitability. These are the conflicts that sit at a structural level, not a personality level, and they require a different facilitation approach.

Structural conflict does not resolve through better relationships. You can improve trust between the CFO and the Chief Commercial Officer, but if their roles are set up to prioritise opposing outcomes, the conflict will continue. Michael designs offsites that redesign how decisions get made so that structural tensions get resolved at the system level, not left to individuals to navigate.

His sessions focus on building decision-making frameworks that acknowledge the trade-offs explicitly, assign clear ownership to different outcomes, and stop expecting one person to hold both sides of an inherent tension. He helps exec teams move from trying to resolve unresolvable conflicts to managing them productively.

Core elements of his structural conflict offsites:

• Trade-off mapping, where the exec team names the inherent tensions between competing priorities and stops pretending they can optimise for everything at once.

• Decision rights clarification, so it is clear who has final say when growth priorities conflict with sustainability priorities, or when innovation priorities conflict with operational stability.

• Governance redesign, where the exec team builds new meeting structures and decision cadences that force trade-off conversations to happen early, not after commitments have already been made.

• Follow-through mechanisms that test whether the new decision frameworks are actually being used or whether the team has reverted to avoiding the hard trade-offs.

Michael does not try to resolve structural conflicts through relationship-building. He redesigns how the system works so the conflict gets managed, not ignored.

8. Priya Kapoor

Priya Kapoor facilitates offsites for executive teams in organisations going through mergers, acquisitions, or significant restructures where the leadership team is made up of people from different legacy organisations who do not trust each other yet. Her clients are CEOs trying to build one executive team out of two groups of people who have different cultures, different priorities, and different loyalties.

Post-merger executive teams fail when facilitators treat them like normal teams. They are not. Half the room is grieving the organisation they lost. The other half is defensive about the organisation they represent. Trust has not been built. Shared history does not exist. The conflicts are not about the work, they are about identity and belonging.

Priya designs offsites that acknowledge this reality and build trust slowly, not by pretending it already exists. Her sessions focus on creating shared experiences, surfacing the cultural differences explicitly, and building new norms together rather than imposing one organisation's norms on everyone.

Her post-merger offsites include:

• Cultural archaeology sessions where each part of the legacy organisation names what they valued about the old culture, what they are grieving, and what they want to protect in the new one.

• Shared problem-solving exercises designed to create new wins together, so the team starts building a history of collaboration rather than only carrying the history of separation.

• Explicit norm-setting conversations where the new executive team co-creates how they will work together, rather than assuming one group's norms will become the default.

• Follow-up rituals that reinforce the new shared identity and give the team regular moments to reflect on whether the merger is working at the leadership level, not just the operational level.

Priya understands that post-merger integration at the exec team level is as much about grief and identity as it is about strategy and structure. She builds offsites that honour both.

9. James Caldwell

James Caldwell facilitates offsites for executive teams where the founder or long-tenured CEO is transitioning out and the leadership team is navigating the shift from founder-led to professionally-led. He works with family businesses, founder-led startups, and organisations where one person has been the centre of gravity for 10 or 20 years and the exec team does not know how to operate without them.

Founder transitions break executive teams when the transition is treated as an event, not a process. The outgoing leader says they are stepping back but keeps making decisions. The incoming leader says they have authority but the team still defers to the founder. The executive team is caught between two centres of gravity and paralysed by the ambiguity.

James designs offsites that make the transition explicit, move authority visibly and completely, and help the executive team build new operating rhythms that do not depend on the founder being in the room. His sessions are structured to give both leaders clarity about their roles during the transition and to give the exec team permission to start operating differently.

His founder-transition offsites focus on:

• Role clarity for the outgoing and incoming leader, with explicit agreements about which decisions each person still makes and which decisions have moved.

• Symbolic handover moments during the offsite where authority is transferred visibly in front of the exec team, so there is no ambiguity about who is leading now.

• New operating rhythms that do not include the founder, so the exec team starts practicing decision-making without them before the founder is fully gone.

• Follow-up coaching for the outgoing leader to help them step back without undermining the new leader, and for the incoming leader to help them claim authority without waiting for permission.

James does not let founder transitions stay ambiguous. He makes the shift explicit, visible, and complete.

10. Rebecca Lawson

Rebecca Lawson facilitates offsites for executive teams in organisations where psychological safety is low, people are afraid to speak up, and the leadership team has learned to stay polite rather than risk conflict. Her clients are CEOs who know their exec team is not telling them the truth, and leaders who have realised that the culture of niceness is killing honest conversation.

Low psychological safety does not fix itself. You cannot just tell people it is safe to speak up. They have learned through experience that it is not. The exec team has watched what happens when someone challenges the CEO or names a problem directly. They have learned to stay quiet.

Rebecca designs offsites that rebuild psychological safety from the ground up by changing the behaviours of the most senior person in the room first, not by asking the team to be braver. Her sessions focus on teaching leaders how to receive hard feedback without defensiveness, how to reward dissent, and how to model vulnerability.

Her psychological safety offsites include:

• Leader self-assessment where the CEO or most senior leader reflects on how they respond to challenge, disagreement, and bad news, and identifies the behaviours they need to change.

• Live practice during the offsite where the leader receives hard feedback in front of the team and models how to take it without defensiveness or retaliation.

• Team norm-setting that makes dissent and disagreement explicit expectations, not optional behaviours.

• Follow-up observation and coaching to help the leader sustain the new behaviours after the offsite, because one good moment in the room does not change years of learned caution.

Rebecca does not ask teams to be braver. She helps leaders become safer to challenge.

ACCOUNTABILITY AND EXECUTION FACILITATORS

The facilitators in this section work with executive teams where the problem is not vision or relationships, but follow-through. These are the teams that set priorities and then do not deliver on them. They leave offsites with clear commitments that quietly disappear three months later. The issue is not clarity or alignment. The issue is accountability. These facilitators specialise in building the systems that make strategy survive contact with real work.

11. Tom Hendricks

Tom Hendricks facilitates offsites for executive teams who leave every strategy session with priorities that never get executed. His clients are leaders who are tired of setting goals that sit in documents nobody opens and frustrated that the same strategic conversations happen every year because nothing changed after the last offsite.

Priorities fail because most offsites end with agreement, not accountability. The team agrees on the three things that matter most. Everyone nods. The document gets written. But nobody owns the outcome. Nobody has committed to a specific milestone by a specific date. Nobody is checking progress. The priorities were set but the accountability system was not.

Tom designs offsites where the accountability gets built during the session, not after it. His offsites do not end until every priority has a named owner, a measurable outcome, a deadline, and a follow-up rhythm locked in. He uses a framework called the Accountability Architecture, which forces executive teams to specify what done looks like, who is responsible for making it happen, and how progress will be tracked and reported.

His accountability-focused offsites include:

• Outcome definition sessions where the exec team translates strategic priorities into specific, measurable outcomes with clear success criteria.

• Owner assignment, where one person is named as accountable for each outcome, not a committee or a group.

• Milestone mapping, where the owner breaks the outcome into 30-day, 60-day, and 90-day milestones with visible progress indicators.

• Follow-up cadence design, where the team builds the meeting rhythm that will be used to review progress, surface blockers, and hold each other accountable after the offsite.

Tom does not let executive teams leave the room until the accountability system is locked in. If your last offsite produced priorities that disappeared, Tom builds the structure that keeps them alive.

12. Vanessa Tan

Vanessa Tan facilitates offsites for executive teams where the accountability problem is not structure, it is culture. The systems exist. The meeting rhythms are in place. But nobody actually holds each other accountable because the team has learned that calling out underperformance is career-limiting or relationship-damaging.

Accountability without honest feedback is performance theatre. The exec team has the dashboard. They review the numbers. But when someone misses a milestone, the conversation stays polite. When someone commits to something and does not deliver, nobody names it directly. The team nods through the update and moves on.

Vanessa designs offsites that teach executive teams how to give and receive hard feedback in real time. Her sessions are not about building better tracking systems. They are about changing the team's willingness to name underperformance directly and building the relational trust that makes hard feedback feel like support, not attack.

Her feedback-culture offsites focus on:

• Live feedback practice during the offsite, where exec team members give each other direct, specific feedback on recent underperformance in front of the group.

• Norm-setting around what accountability looks like in practice, including explicit agreements about how quickly underperformance gets named and what language gets used.

• Leader modeling, where the CEO or most senior person receives feedback from the team on where they are underperforming, demonstrating that accountability applies to everyone.

• Follow-up coaching to help individuals who struggle to give hard feedback build the skill and confidence to do it outside the offsite.

Vanessa does not assume feedback skills exist. She builds them during the offsite and holds the team accountable to practicing them after.

13. Daniel Park

Daniel Park facilitates offsites for executive teams in operational environments where execution is everything and the offsite needs to produce tangible results fast. His clients are leaders in logistics, manufacturing, construction, and operations-heavy businesses where strategy conversations feel abstract and the exec team wants practical plans they can implement Monday morning.

Operations-focused exec teams do not need another vision session. They need to solve specific execution problems. The bottleneck in the supply chain. The safety incident rate that has crept up. The project that is three months behind schedule. The client relationship that is at risk.

Daniel designs offsites that feel more like working sessions than retreats. His approach is high-tempo, action-oriented, and built around solving real problems with the people in the room. The offsite produces plans, not documents. Decisions, not alignment. Commitments, not aspirations.

His execution-focused offsites include:

• Problem prioritisation at the start of the session, where the exec team identifies the three operational issues that are costing the most time, money, or risk.

• Rapid problem-solving sprints for each issue, using root cause analysis and constraint mapping to identify the real blocker and the fastest path to resolution.

• Decision-making in the room, with clear authority to commit resources, move people, and change processes without needing to take it back to another meeting.

• Implementation planning before the session ends, with named owners, next actions, and follow-up check-ins scheduled before people leave.

Daniel does not run reflective strategy offsites. He runs execution workshops that produce results fast.

14. Lisa Morgan

Lisa Morgan facilitates offsites for executive teams where the accountability gap is between what the exec team commits to and what the rest of the organisation actually delivers. The leadership team leaves the offsite aligned, but the layer below them does not know what changed, does not understand the priorities, and continues doing what they have always done.

Strategy dies in the translation layer. The exec team agrees on the direction. But the message that reaches middle management is vague, contradictory, or non-existent. The frontline staff have no idea the strategy changed. The offsite produced alignment at the top, but no cascade.

Lisa designs offsites that build the communication and cascade plan during the session, not after it. Her offsites include time for the exec team to design how the strategy will be communicated, what will be said to different audiences, who will deliver the message, and how understanding will be tested.

Her cascade-focused offsites include:

• Message design sessions where the exec team translates the strategy into clear, repeatable messages for middle managers, frontline staff, and other stakeholder groups.

• Cascade planning, where the team maps out who will communicate what, to whom, by when, and through which channels.

• Objection planning, where the exec team anticipates the questions, concerns, and resistance they will face from the organisation and prepares responses in advance.

• Follow-up listening mechanisms to test whether the message landed, whether people understand the strategy, and whether behaviour is changing in response.

Lisa does not let executive teams assume the organisation will figure it out. She builds the cascade into the offsite design.

15. Aaron Mitchell

Aaron Mitchell facilitates offsites for executive teams in high-growth or high-change environments where priorities shift faster than the accountability systems can keep up. His clients are leaders managing multiple concurrent initiatives, frequent pivots, and a leadership team that is struggling to know what to focus on because the strategy keeps changing.

Accountability systems built for stability break in high-change environments. The exec team sets priorities in January. By March the market has shifted and two of the priorities are irrelevant. The team is still tracking progress on goals that no longer matter while the real work is happening outside the accountability system.

Aaron designs offsites that build adaptive accountability, where the system is designed to handle change rather than assume stability. His approach focuses on building decision rules for when priorities shift, creating faster feedback loops, and giving the exec team permission to kill initiatives that are no longer strategic.

His adaptive accountability offsites include:

• Decision rules for priority shifts, so the team has explicit criteria for when a priority gets paused, killed, or replaced.

• Faster review cadences, moving from quarterly reviews to monthly or even weekly check-ins so the team can respond to change faster.

• Kill criteria for every initiative, so the team knows in advance what would trigger stopping work on something, rather than letting failing initiatives drag on.

• Scenario planning for likely disruptions, so the team has pre-built responses ready and does not have to rebuild the strategy from scratch every time the environment shifts.

Aaron does not build accountability systems that assume the plan will stay the same. He builds systems that assume change and design for it.

GOVERNANCE AND DECISION-MAKING FACILITATORS

The facilitators in this section work with executive teams where the problem is how decisions get made. These are the teams where meetings run long but produce no decisions, where the same issues get discussed every month without resolution, or where decision rights are so unclear that nothing moves without the CEO in the room. These facilitators specialise in redesigning governance structures and decision-making processes so that the exec team can actually govern.

16. Katherine Lee

Katherine Lee facilitates offsites for executive teams where decisions take too long, require too many people, and still end up back on the CEO's desk. Her clients are leaders who are tired of being the bottleneck and frustrated that their exec team cannot make decisions without them.

Decision bottlenecks exist because decision rights are unclear. The exec team does not know which decisions they can make on their own and which decisions need the CEO. They do not know which decisions require full exec team consensus and which can be made by a single owner. So every decision escalates, every decision waits for the full team, and the CEO ends up making calls on things that should never have reached them.

Katherine designs offsites that map decision rights explicitly and redistribute decision-making authority so the CEO is not the centre of every call. Her sessions use a decision rights matrix that categorises every recurring decision the exec team faces and assigns clear ownership, approval rights, and consultation requirements.

Her decision rights offsites include:

• Decision inventory, where the exec team lists every recurring decision they make and identifies which ones are currently bottlenecked.

• Decision rights mapping, where each decision is assigned to an owner with explicit authority to make the call, and the team specifies who needs to be consulted versus who just needs to be informed.

• Delegation agreements, where the CEO formally hands over decision authority for specific categories of decisions and commits to not overruling those decisions after they are made.

• Follow-up testing, where the team tracks whether the new decision rights are being used or whether decisions are still escalating to the CEO out of habit.

Katherine does not ask the CEO to trust the team more. She builds the structure that makes distributed decision-making safe and clear.

17. Ben Christiansen

Ben Christiansen facilitates offsites for executive teams where meetings are the problem. The team meets too often, the meetings run too long, the agendas are unclear, and nothing actually gets decided. His clients are leaders who leave every exec team meeting wondering what just happened and why it took three hours.

Bad meetings are a governance problem, not a facilitation problem. The issue is not that the team needs a better facilitator in the room. The issue is that the meeting has no clear decision-making authority, no structured agenda, and no follow-up accountability.

Ben designs offsites that redesign the exec team's entire meeting architecture. His sessions map out which meetings the team actually needs, what each meeting is for, who needs to be in the room, and what decisions each meeting is authorised to make. He kills meetings that do not have a clear purpose and restructures the ones that remain.

His meeting redesign offsites include:

• Meeting audit, where the exec team lists every recurring meeting they attend and evaluates whether it has a clear purpose, produces decisions, or could be replaced with an email.

• Meeting type definition, where the team distinguishes between decision-making meetings, information-sharing meetings, problem-solving meetings, and strategic planning meetings, and designs each type differently.

• Agenda discipline, where every meeting type gets a structured agenda template that specifies what gets discussed, in what order, and what outcome the meeting is designed to produce.

• Follow-up mechanisms, where the team builds post-meeting accountability so that decisions made in the room actually get executed outside it.

Ben does not try to make bad meetings better. He kills them and rebuilds the meeting system from scratch.

18. Alison Grant

Alison Grant facilitates offsites for executive teams where consensus culture is killing decision-making speed. Her clients are leaders in organisations where every decision requires everyone to agree, which means decisions take months, compromises get made that satisfy nobody, and bold moves never happen because somebody always objects.

Consensus sounds collaborative but it is often just conflict avoidance. The exec team has learned that dissent is uncomfortable, so they keep talking until everyone can live with the decision. The result is slow, watered-down decisions that do not reflect anyone's actual conviction.

Alison designs offsites that move executive teams from consensus to consent, where the standard is not "does everyone agree" but "can everyone live with this and commit to it". Her sessions teach teams how to make faster decisions with less agreement, how to test for real objections versus preferences, and how to move forward even when some people are not fully convinced.

Her consent-based decision offsites include:

• Consent versus consensus training, where the team learns the difference between "I agree with this" and "I can commit to this even though it is not my preference".

• Objection testing, where team members learn to distinguish between a real objection (this decision will cause harm) and a preference (I would do it differently).

• Decision-making experiments during the offsite, where the team practices making decisions using consent and reflects on how it feels different from consensus.

• Follow-up norms that lock in the new decision standard and prevent the team from reverting to consensus out of habit.

Alison does not make teams agree faster. She teaches them to move forward without full agreement.

19. David Frost

David Frost facilitates offsites for boards and executive teams where the governance boundary is unclear and the board is either too involved in operations or too distant from the real issues. His clients are CEOs managing boards that second-guess operational decisions, and board chairs managing boards that are not asking the right strategic questions.

Board and exec dysfunction comes from role confusion. The board does not know where governance ends and management begins. The CEO does not know what decisions to bring to the board and what decisions to make independently. The exec team does not know whether the board is there to support them or scrutinise them.

David designs offsites that clarify the governance boundary and rebuild the working relationship between the board and the executive team. His sessions bring both groups into the same room to co-create the operating norms, decision rights, and communication rhythms that will govern the relationship going forward.

His board-exec alignment offsites include:

• Role clarity workshops where the board and exec team map out which decisions belong to the board, which belong to the CEO, and which require joint input.

• Communication rhythm design, where both groups agree on what information flows to the board, how often, in what format, and with how much notice.

• Trust-building exercises that move the relationship from adversarial scrutiny to collaborative partnership.

• Follow-up review sessions where the board and exec team reflect on whether the new norms are working or whether the boundary is still unclear.

David does not let boards and exec teams operate in silos. He brings them together to design the governance relationship explicitly.

20. Sarah Cummings

Sarah Cummings facilitates offsites for executive teams in federated or matrixed organisations where decision-making is paralysed by unclear authority across business units, regions, or functions. Her clients are leaders trying to make decisions that cut across silos in organisations where nobody has clear authority to make the call.

Matrix organisations distribute accountability so widely that nobody feels accountable. A decision requires input from three different functions, approval from two regional leaders, and consultation with a central corporate team. By the time everyone has weighed in, the decision is so diluted that it does not solve the original problem, or it has taken so long that the market has moved on.

Sarah designs offsites that cut through matrix complexity by assigning clear decision owners even in ambiguous structural environments. Her sessions identify which decisions are genuinely cross-functional and need input from multiple parties, and which decisions are only cross-functional because the organisation has not been willing to give someone final authority.

Her matrix decision-making offsites include:

• Decision owner assignment, where one person is named as the decision-maker for each category of decision, even if that decision affects multiple parts of the organisation.

• Consult versus inform mapping, where the team specifies who needs to be consulted before a decision is made versus who just needs to be informed after.

• Escalation protocols for the rare cases where a decision genuinely cannot be resolved at the exec team level and needs to be escalated to the CEO or the board.

• Follow-up tracking to test whether decision ownership is being respected or whether the matrix is reasserting itself and pulling decisions back into committee.

Sarah does not accept that matrix structures require consensus on everything. She assigns decision ownership and teaches the organisation to respect it.

CULTURE AND VALUES FACILITATORS

The facilitators in this section work with executive teams where the culture problem has reached the leadership level. These are the organisations where the stated values do not match the lived behaviours, where toxic patterns have been tolerated for too long, or where the exec team knows the culture is broken but does not know how to fix it. These facilitators specialise in culture change that starts at the top, not culture programs that get delivered to the bottom.

21. Emma Winters

Emma Winters facilitates offsites for executive teams in organisations where the gap between stated values and actual behaviour has become a credibility problem. Her clients are leaders who have discovered that the values on the wall mean nothing to the people doing the work, and that the exec team themselves are not living the values they expect everyone else to follow.

Values do not change culture unless leaders change behaviour first. The organisation has a set of values. Respect. Collaboration. Innovation. Integrity. They are on the website. They are in the onboarding materials. And nobody believes them, because the exec team does not model them.

Emma designs offsites that force executive teams to audit their own behaviour against the stated values and commit to specific behaviour changes that will be visible to the rest of the organisation. Her sessions do not produce new values. They produce accountability for living the ones that already exist.

Her values-alignment offsites include:

• Behaviour audits, where each exec team member reflects on where their behaviour contradicts the stated values and identifies the specific changes they need to make.

• Public commitments during the offsite, where each leader names one behaviour they will start doing and one behaviour they will stop doing, in front of the team.

• Peer accountability agreements, where exec team members commit to calling each other out when they see behaviour that contradicts the values.

• Follow-up culture surveys to test whether the rest of the organisation is noticing the behaviour change or whether the exec team reverted to old patterns.

Emma does not let leaders talk about values. She makes them accountable to living them.

22. Liam Hughes

Liam Hughes facilitates offsites for executive teams in organisations where toxic behaviour has been tolerated at the senior level and the exec team needs to confront it. His clients are CEOs who know they have a senior leader who is damaging the culture but have avoided the conversation for months or years.

Toxic senior leaders do not fix themselves. The rest of the exec team knows the behaviour is unacceptable. The CEO knows. But nobody has been willing to name it directly or set a clear boundary. The toxic leader continues because the cost of confronting them has felt higher than the cost of tolerating them.

Liam designs offsites that bring the conversation into the open and force a resolution. His sessions are high-stakes, direct, and designed to produce a clear decision about whether the person stays or goes, and if they stay, what behaviour change is non-negotiable.

His toxic-behaviour confrontation offsites include:

• Pre-session interviews with every exec team member to understand the full scope of the behaviour, the impact it is having, and whether the team believes change is possible.

• Direct confrontation during the offsite, where the toxic behaviour is named in specific terms and the leader is given clear expectations for change.

• Accountability structures that specify what behaviour change looks like, how it will be measured, and what the consequences are if it does not happen.

• Follow-up observation and decision points, where the exec team reviews whether the behaviour has changed and makes a final call on whether the person can remain in the role.

Liam does not let toxic behaviour stay unnamed. He brings it into the room and forces resolution.

23. Olivia Chen

Olivia Chen facilitates offsites for executive teams rebuilding culture after a crisis. Her clients are leaders managing the aftermath of a public scandal, a major safety incident, a discrimination lawsuit, or a mass resignation event where the culture problem became visible to everyone and the exec team is now responsible for fixing it.

Culture repair after a crisis requires a different offsite. The exec team is under scrutiny. The organisation does not trust them. The board is watching. The media may still be reporting. A normal strategy offsite feels tone-deaf. A values-refresh exercise feels like PR.

Olivia designs offsites that acknowledge the crisis, take responsibility for what went wrong, and build a credible repair plan that the organisation can see and believe. Her sessions are about accountability, behaviour change, and rebuilding trust from the ground up.

Her crisis culture-repair offsites include:

• Responsibility mapping, where the exec team names what went wrong, who was responsible, and what should have been done differently.

• Listening sessions with staff, where the exec team hears directly from the people affected by the crisis and sits with the impact without defending or minimising.

• Behaviour commitments that are visible and verifiable, so the organisation can see that the exec team is changing how they operate, not just talking about it.

• Public accountability mechanisms, where the exec team reports back to the organisation on progress and invites ongoing feedback.

Olivia does not run offsites that pretend the crisis did not happen. She uses the offsite to take responsibility and begin repair.

24. Marcus Reid

Marcus Reid facilitates offsites for executive teams in organisations experiencing rapid demographic or cultural change where the leadership team has not kept pace. His clients are leaders who have realised their exec team is not representative of the organisation they lead, and that the lack of diversity at the top is affecting decisions, culture, and retention.

Diversity at the exec level is not a pipeline problem, it is a selection and retention problem. The organisation has diverse talent. But the people who make it to the exec team all look the same, think the same, and come from the same background. The pipeline is full. The filter is broken.

Marcus designs offsites that force executive teams to confront how their own biases, norms, and expectations are filtering out diverse talent before it reaches the leadership level. His sessions are direct, uncomfortable, and focused on changing the exec team's behaviour and decision-making, not on launching a diversity program for other people.

His diversity and inclusion offsites include:

• Bias audits, where the exec team reviews recent hiring, promotion, and succession decisions and identifies where bias shaped the outcome.

• Norm interrogation, where the team examines the unwritten rules about what leadership looks like in the organisation and identifies which norms are excluding people.

• Behaviour commitments, where each exec team member identifies one way they will change how they evaluate, sponsor, or promote talent.

• Follow-up tracking of hiring and promotion decisions to test whether the exec team is actually changing behaviour or whether the same patterns persist.

Marcus does not run diversity offsites that put the work on other people. He holds the exec team accountable for changing their own behaviour first.

25. Grace Li

Grace Li facilitates offsites for executive teams navigating generational transitions in the workforce where the leadership team is struggling to understand, engage, or retain younger employees. Her clients are leaders who have realised their exec team is out of touch with what matters to the talent they need to attract and keep.

Generational disconnects at the exec level create retention crises. The exec team designs policies, benefits, and culture based on what mattered to them when they were early in their career. But the workforce has changed. Younger employees value different things, communicate differently, and have different expectations of leadership. The exec team does not understand it and often dismisses it as entitlement.

Grace designs offsites that help executive teams understand generational shifts without patronising or stereotyping, and that redesign how the organisation attracts, engages, and retains younger talent. Her sessions include direct input from younger employees so the exec team hears the gap between what they think is happening and what is actually happening.

Her generational-transition offsites include:

• Listening panels with younger employees, where the exec team hears directly what is working, what is not, and what would make them stay.

• Assumption testing, where the exec team names what they believe younger employees want and then tests those assumptions against real data.

• Policy redesign, where the team identifies which policies were designed for a different generation and need to be rebuilt for the workforce they are trying to retain now.

• Follow-up pulse surveys with younger employees to test whether the changes are landing or whether the exec team is still out of touch.

Grace does not let exec teams assume they understand the workforce. She brings the voices into the room and makes the team listen.

Your next step is simple. Review this list and identify the facilitators whose approach matches the specific challenge your executive team is facing. If your last offsite produced alignment that disappeared three months later, you need a facilitator who designs for follow-through, not just the day in the room. If your exec team has unresolved conflict that is blocking decisions, you need a facilitator who moves toward the tension, not around it.

Reach out at jonno@consultclarity.org if you are trying to decide which type of offsite your team actually needs. The facilitator matters less than getting clear on the problem you are trying to solve.

The offsite is not the solution. The offsite is the starting point for the work that happens after.