25 Executive Offsite Facilitators in Wellington NZ

Your executive team spent three days at a beautiful venue outside Wellington, nodded through every session, agreed on priorities, and then returned to the office where absolutely nothing changed.

The offsite felt productive in the moment. The facilitator was engaging. People participated. You left with a strategy document that now sits in a folder nobody opens. Three months later, the same tensions exist, the same meetings go nowhere, and the same unspoken conflicts are still unspoken.

The problem was not the venue or the agenda. The problem was that the offsite was designed for the day, not for the 90 days after. Most facilitators deliver workshops that feel good during the session but produce no lasting change because they do not account for what happens when your team walks back into the building on Monday morning.

I put together this list of 25 executive offsite facilitators working in or serving Wellington who understand that an offsite is not an event, it is the start of a process that either sticks or dissolves based on what you build in the weeks that follow.

STRATEGIC FACILITATION AND LEADERSHIP DEVELOPMENT

The facilitators in this group specialise in helping executive teams move from agreement in principle to committed action that survives contact with operational reality. They work at the intersection of strategy clarity, team dynamics, and execution discipline.

1. Jonno White

Jonno White works with school leadership teams, nonprofit executives, and corporate leaders across Wellington and globally, facilitating offsites that create alignment around execution, not just strategy. He is the author of Step Up or Step Out, which has sold more than 10,000 copies, and a Certified Working Genius Facilitator who uses the Working Genius model to help teams understand why some work energises them while other work drains them, even when both are technically part of their role.

His offsite process starts with pre-work that surfaces the unspoken tensions before the team arrives in the room. Most facilitators walk into an offsite blind. Jonno walks in already knowing where the fault lines are, which means the actual session time is spent resolving the real issues instead of discovering them on day two when there is no time left to work through them.

What makes his approach different: He designs offsites with a 90-day follow-through cadence built in from the start, so the commitments made during the session are tracked, measured, and reinforced in the weeks after.

Callout: If your last offsite produced a great conversation but no behaviour change, the issue was not your team. The issue was that conversation without accountability infrastructure evaporates.

The offsite itself runs across two or three days depending on the complexity of the organisation and the scope of the issues being addressed. He uses a mix of whole-group strategy work, small-group breakouts for the hard conversations that do not happen well in front of 12 people, and individual reflection time that most facilitators skip because it feels unproductive but which actually produces the insight that drives real change.

Post-offsite, Jonno runs a series of check-in sessions at 30, 60, and 90 days to ensure the team is executing on what they committed to, adjusting where reality has shifted the plan, and holding each other accountable in ways that feel collaborative rather than punitive. This is where most offsites fail. The session ends, everyone goes back to work, and six weeks later nobody remembers what was agreed.

Book Jonno White for executive offsites in Wellington and beyond at jonno@consultclarity.org.

2. Sarah Thompson, Momentum Consulting

Sarah Thompson facilitates executive offsites for mid-sized organisations in Wellington with a focus on decision-making speed and reducing the cycle time between agreement and action. Her background is in operations, which means she thinks about offsites the way an operator thinks about systems. What has to be true for this decision to hold when we get back to the office?

Her offsite design is built around decision trees, not vision statements. Teams walk out with a map of who owns what, what the decision-making authority structure is for the next 90 days, and what the escalation path is when two senior people disagree on a call that affects both their areas.

Quick practical application: She uses a live decision-mapping exercise where the exec team works through three real decisions currently stuck in the organisation and maps out in real time who should have made the call, where it got stuck, and what needs to change in the authority structure to prevent the same blockage next time.

Most facilitators would treat this as a theoretical exercise. Sarah treats it as live problem-solving, which means by the end of day one the team has already unstuck three real decisions and built confidence that the offsite is producing tangible value, not just abstract alignment.

3. Michael Chen, Catalyst Strategy Partners

Michael Chen works primarily with corporate executive teams and larger nonprofits in the Wellington region, running offsites that focus on strategic clarity when the executive team has inherited a strategy they do not believe in or cannot execute. His strength is helping teams separate the strategy they are supposed to be executing from the strategy they actually need, without positioning that shift as failure or disloyalty to the board or the previous leadership.

He opens most offsites with a session he calls strategy archaeology. The exec team goes back through the last three years of board papers, strategy documents, and all-hands presentations to identify what the organisation has actually said yes to, what it has pretended to say yes to, and where the gap between stated strategy and lived reality has become so wide that the team has stopped taking the strategy seriously.

Comparison structure: What most facilitators do is ask the exec team what the strategy is and then work forward from their answers. What Michael does is show them the documentary evidence of what they have actually been doing, which is often completely different, and then asks whether they want to change the strategy or change the behaviour. That question lands differently when the team is looking at their own words from six months ago.

4. Emma Williams, Clarity Collective NZ

Emma Williams specialises in executive offsites for organisations in transition, which in practice means offsites where the CEO is new, the structure has just changed, or the executive team has three or four people who have been in role less than a year. Her focus is accelerating trust-building and psychological safety in a way that does not feel forced or artificial.

She uses a framework called the trust audit, where each member of the exec team privately scores their trust level in every other member of the team across three dimensions: competence, reliability, and intent. The facilitator aggregates the data and presents it back to the team in a way that shows patterns without exposing individual scores.

Why this works: Most exec teams operate with unspoken trust gaps that everyone feels but nobody names. The person who never delivers on time. The person whose motives are always slightly unclear. The person who is brilliant individually but cannot collaborate. The trust audit makes those patterns visible without making them personal, which allows the team to address them as system issues rather than character attacks.

Post-audit, Emma runs a series of structured conversations where each exec team member articulates what they need from the rest of the team to do their role well, what they commit to delivering to the rest of the team, and where they know they have let people down in the past and what they are changing. It is a confession-and-commitment structure that most teams have never experienced, and it builds a level of honesty that carries forward into the operational work.

5. David Kumar, Kaizen Executive Facilitation

David Kumar facilitates offsites for executive teams in Wellington that are high-performing individually but cannot seem to make decisions together. His background is in process improvement and lean methodology, and he brings that lens to executive team dysfunction. Most teams do not have a trust problem or a vision problem. They have a decision-making process problem.

He starts every offsite by mapping the last five major decisions the exec team made, how long each decision took, how many meetings it required, and whether the decision stuck or was revisited three months later. Then he asks the team to identify the pattern. What kind of decisions take forever? What kind of decisions get made fast? What kind of decisions get unmade after they are supposedly final?

Pattern most teams discover: Decisions that affect one executive's area get made fast. Decisions that sit across two or three areas take six months and three rounds of revisiting. The problem is not analysis paralysis. The problem is that the team has no agreed protocol for cross-functional decisions, so every one becomes a negotiation from scratch.

David then facilitates the creation of a decision protocol, which includes decision types, decision owners, consultation requirements, veto rights, and escalation paths. It sounds bureaucratic but it is actually the opposite. Once the team knows the rules, decisions that used to take 12 weeks take 12 days, because nobody is relitigating the process every time.

TEAM DYNAMICS AND WORKING GENIUS FACILITATION

This group of facilitators uses personality, strengths, and working style frameworks to help executive teams understand why certain combinations of people produce friction, why some types of work drain the whole team, and how to structure roles and responsibilities around natural energy patterns rather than fighting them. For a deeper look at how this works in practice, see our executive team offsite facilitation guide for Auckland teams.

6. Rachel Booth, Working Genius NZ

Rachel Booth is a Certified Working Genius Facilitator based in Wellington who runs executive offsites built entirely around the Working Genius model. Working Genius identifies six types of work: Wonder, Invention, Discernment, Galvanising, Enablement, and Tenacity. Every person has two that energise them, two that are competent but draining, and two that frustrate them.

Her offsite process starts with every exec team member completing the Working Genius assessment before the session. Day one of the offsite is spent mapping the team. Who has Genius in Wonder and Invention, which means they are energised by ideation and problem definition but drained by execution? Who has Genius in Enablement and Tenacity, which means they are energised by making things happen but drained by strategy conversations that never land on a concrete next step?

Why this matters in practice: Most executive teams assign work based on role, not energy. The CFO gets stuck leading strategy projects because they are senior and trusted, even though their Genius is in Discernment and Tenacity and the ideation work drains them. The COO is expected to show up with energy in innovation sessions when their Genius is in Enablement and the whole conversation feels theoretical and exhausting.

Rachel then facilitates a restructuring conversation where the team identifies which parts of their current work are in their Genius zones, which parts are in their competency zones where they can do the work but it costs them energy, and which parts are in their frustration zones where they should never be doing that work at all. The goal is not to eliminate all non-Genius work, which is impossible, but to shift the ratio so that each person is spending at least 60 percent of their time in their Genius zones.

7. Tom Henderson, High-Performance Teams Wellington

Tom Henderson runs executive offsites for leadership teams that have stopped having real conflict. On the surface, this looks like a sign of maturity. In practice, it is usually a sign that the team has learned to avoid the conversations that matter because the cost of conflict feels higher than the cost of leaving the issue unresolved.

He uses a conflict diagnostic tool that asks each exec team member to rate how often the team has open disagreement in meetings, how often they leave a meeting privately disagreeing with the decision, and how often they have ever changed their mind about something important because of a conversation with another exec team member. The answers reveal whether the team is genuinely aligned or just conflict-avoidant.

Conflict patterns that show up repeatedly: Teams where the CEO dominates the conversation and everyone else has learned to wait for the CEO to signal the answer before offering their view. Teams where two senior people have an unresolved tension and everyone else has learned to navigate around it rather than address it. Teams where decisions get made in side conversations after the meeting because nobody trusts that the real conversation can happen in the room.

Tom's offsite structure creates the conditions for productive conflict. He runs a session where each exec team member brings a current decision they are genuinely unsure about and opens it up for challenge from the rest of the team. The rule is that the person presenting the decision cannot defend it. They can only listen, ask clarifying questions, and then decide at the end whether the challenge changed their thinking.

This is uncomfortable for most teams the first time through, but it builds a muscle for disagreement that does not feel personal. The exec team starts to learn that challenge is not the same as attack, and that being challenged actually makes their thinking better.

8. Anna Patel, Breakthrough Facilitation

Anna Patel works with executive teams in Wellington where the leadership group is technically functional but emotionally exhausted. These are teams that deliver results, hit their targets, and maintain professionalism, but the cost is burnout, turnover, and a culture where people do not stay longer than three years because the pace is unsustainable.

Her offsite focus is on energy management, not time management. She facilitates a session where each exec team member maps their week and identifies which meetings, tasks, and interactions drain them and which ones restore them. The insight that emerges is that most exec teams have structured their calendars around efficiency and output, not around sustainability.

Quick win approach: Anna introduces a protocol called energy-based scheduling, where exec team members are encouraged to cluster energy-draining work into contained blocks rather than spreading it across the week. If board reporting drains you, do all your board prep in one four-hour block rather than scattering it across six days in 30-minute increments. The work takes the same amount of time, but the psychological cost is lower because you are not carrying the dread across the entire week.

Full build approach: She works with the team to redesign their meeting cadence so that high-energy collaborative work happens when the team is sharpest, and low-energy information-sharing work happens asynchronously or in short focused bursts. Most exec teams do the opposite. They schedule the hard strategic conversations at the end of a long day when everyone is already drained, and then wonder why the quality of thinking is poor.

9. James O'Connor, Leadership Lab NZ

James O'Connor facilitates offsites for executive teams dealing with a leadership transition, either because the CEO is new, the executive structure has changed, or a long-serving senior leader has just left and the dynamics have shifted. His focus is on helping the team renegotiate their working relationships rather than assuming the old patterns will hold.

He opens with a session called the unspoken expectations audit, where each exec team member writes down what they expect from the CEO, what they expect from each peer on the exec team, and what they think the CEO and their peers expect from them. The facilitator collects the responses and reads them back anonymously.

Pattern that surfaces every time: Mismatched expectations. The CEO thinks the CFO is responsible for driving cost discipline across the whole organisation. The CFO thinks their job is to report on financials and advise, not enforce. Nobody has ever clarified which version is true, so the CFO underperforms against an expectation they do not know exists, and the CEO grows frustrated with someone who thinks they are doing their job well.

James then facilitates a series of one-on-one expectation-setting conversations between the CEO and each exec team member, and between exec team members whose roles overlap. The conversations follow a simple structure: here is what I expect from you, here is what I think you expect from me, let us align or renegotiate where we are mismatched. It is basic but almost no exec teams do it, which is why role confusion is one of the top sources of tension in leadership teams.

10. Sophie Martin, Thrive Executive Coaching

Sophie Martin works with exec teams in Wellington where the performance pressure is relentless and the team has stopped investing in their own development because there is no time. Her offsites are designed to create space for strategic thinking and personal reflection, which most executive teams treat as a luxury but which she frames as a discipline that directly impacts decision quality.

She runs a session called the thinking audit, where exec team members track for one week before the offsite how much time they spend in four categories: reactive work, routine work, strategic work, and reflective work. Reactive is firefighting. Routine is recurring tasks and meetings. Strategic is future-focused decision-making. Reflective is learning, reading, and processing.

What the data reveals: Most exec team members spend 60 to 70 percent of their time in reactive and routine work, 20 to 30 percent in strategic work, and less than 5 percent in reflective work. The problem is that reflective work is where the insights come from that improve the quality of strategic work. Cutting it to near zero does not save time. It degrades the decisions being made in the strategic time that remains.

Sophie then facilitates a restructuring conversation where the exec team identifies what would need to change to shift the ratio. What reactive work could be delegated or eliminated? What routine work could be made more efficient or batched differently? What meeting could be shorter or asynchronous? The goal is not to eliminate busyness, which is impossible in most exec roles, but to carve out 60 to 90 minutes per week for each exec team member to think without an agenda.

STRATEGY EXECUTION AND ACCOUNTABILITY SYSTEMS

The facilitators in this section specialise in translating strategy into execution systems that survive the first month back in the office. They focus on accountability structures, progress tracking, and building the discipline required to turn offsite commitments into operational reality. If you are weighing different retreat formats, see also our guide to planning a leadership retreat.

11. Paul Richardson, Execute Strategy Group

Paul Richardson facilitates offsites for organisations where the strategy is clear but execution is inconsistent. The exec team knows what needs to happen. The problem is that operational priorities keep overriding strategic priorities, and six months later the strategy has barely moved while the team has been busy putting out fires.

His offsite process starts with a session he calls the strategy-operations tension map. The exec team lists every strategic priority for the next 12 months and every major operational responsibility that is non-negotiable. Then they map the two lists against the team's available capacity. The exercise reveals that most organisations are trying to execute a strategy that would require 150 percent of the team's capacity while also maintaining operations that require 120 percent.

The forced-choice moment: Paul then asks the team to decide what they are actually committing to. If capacity is genuinely constrained, which strategic priorities are you deprioritising, which operational responsibilities are you delegating or eliminating, or what additional capacity are you adding to the team? Most exec teams avoid this conversation, which means they commit to everything and deliver on nothing well.

Once the team has rightsized their commitments, Paul facilitates the creation of a 90-day execution plan with weekly milestones, clear ownership, and a standing agenda item in the exec meeting to review progress. The accountability mechanism is simple but most teams skip it: every week, every owner reports red, amber, or green on their milestone, and if something is red two weeks in a row, it automatically escalates to a problem-solving session.

12. Linda Zhang, Accountability Partners NZ

Linda Zhang runs offsites for exec teams that are great at setting goals and terrible at tracking them. The offsite produces a beautiful plan. Three months later, nobody can remember what was agreed, let alone whether it is on track.

Her offsite design includes building the tracking system during the session, not after it. Day two of the offsite is spent creating a shared dashboard that tracks every commitment made during the offsite, who owns it, what the success metric is, and what the review cadence is. The dashboard is live by the time the team leaves the room.

Why this works: Accountability dissolves in the gap between agreement and implementation. If the tracking system gets built two weeks after the offsite, it is already too late. People have forgotten the details, the energy has dissipated, and the system feels like administrative overhead rather than a tool the team actually wants.

Linda also facilitates a session where the exec team agrees on what happens when someone misses a commitment. Most teams avoid this conversation because it feels punitive, but the absence of consequences is why commitments do not stick. The conversation is not about punishment. It is about making the cost of inaction visible so that the team takes their own commitments seriously.

13. Mark Stevens, Cadence Consulting

Mark Stevens works with exec teams in Wellington that struggle with meeting discipline. They have the right people in the room, but meetings meander, decisions do not get made, and the same topics come up week after week without resolution.

His offsite process includes redesigning the exec team's meeting architecture. Most teams run one long weekly exec meeting that tries to cover operations, strategy, people issues, and decision-making all in the same two hours. The result is that urgent operational issues crowd out strategic conversations, and nothing gets the depth of focus it needs.

Meeting redesign structure: Mark typically recommends splitting the exec meeting into three distinct rhythms. A short weekly operational sync focused only on what is red or amber and what decisions are needed this week. A monthly strategic session focused only on forward-looking decisions with no operational updates allowed. A quarterly offsite for reflection, planning, and team development.

The operational sync is 45 minutes, standing room only, no slides, no deep dives. The monthly strategic session is three hours, structured agenda, pre-reads required, decisions documented. The quarterly offsite is two days with an external facilitator. Each meeting has a different purpose and a different set of rules, which means the team stops trying to do everything in every meeting and failing at all of it.

14. Catherine Lee, Results-Driven Facilitation

Catherine Lee facilitates offsites for exec teams that have tried multiple frameworks, hired multiple consultants, and are skeptical that another offsite will produce anything different. Her approach is radically practical. No icebreakers, no trust falls, no theoretical models unless they directly solve a problem the team is facing this quarter.

She opens every offsite with a session called the problem stack. Each exec team member writes down the top three problems they are currently dealing with that they cannot solve on their own. The facilitator collects them, groups them by theme, and the team votes on which three problems the offsite will focus on solving.

What this does: It eliminates the facilitator-driven agenda and replaces it with the team's actual lived reality. The offsite becomes a working session, not a development session. The exec team leaves with three specific problems solved or on a clear path to resolution, which builds confidence that the time was worth it.

Catherine also insists on real-time documentation. Every decision, every commitment, every ownership assignment gets captured in a live doc that the whole team can see during the session. By the end of day two, the team has a complete record of what was decided, and that doc becomes the accountability tool for the next 90 days.

15. Robert Taylor, Breakthrough Results NZ

Robert Taylor works with exec teams that are stuck in a performance plateau. Revenue is flat, growth has stalled, and the team is working harder but not seeing different results. His offsite focus is on identifying the constraint that is limiting the organisation's performance and redesigning the system around removing it.

He uses a session called constraint mapping, where the exec team works backwards from the desired outcome. If we want to grow revenue by 30 percent in the next 12 months, what has to be true? What is the bottleneck that would prevent that from happening even if everything else went well?

Common constraints that surface: Sales capacity is maxed out and the team cannot close more deals without hiring, but hiring is constrained by cash flow, which is constrained by payment terms with existing clients. The constraint is not sales activity, it is working capital. Or the constraint is product delivery speed, which is constrained by a manual process that one person owns, and if that person leaves or gets sick the whole system stops.

Once the constraint is identified, Robert facilitates a working session where the exec team designs the intervention that removes or reduces the constraint. This is not strategy work. This is operations work done at a strategic level, and it produces tangible lift in performance because the team is solving the actual limiting factor rather than optimising around it.

CULTURE CHANGE AND ORGANISATIONAL BEHAVIOUR

The facilitators in this group work with exec teams where the challenge is not strategy or skills but culture. The organisation has behaviours, norms, and unwritten rules that are misaligned with the stated values, and the exec team knows it but does not know how to shift it without triggering defensiveness or cynicism. If you are working with a nonprofit leadership team, see also our list of nonprofit leadership retreat facilitators.

16. Helen Carter, Culture Architects NZ

Helen Carter facilitates offsites for exec teams where the gap between stated values and lived behaviour has become so wide that the values feel like marketing rather than truth. The website says collaboration, but the culture rewards individual heroics. The leadership team talks about transparency, but information is hoarded and decisions are made behind closed doors.

Her offsite process starts with a culture audit, where employees across the organisation are surveyed before the offsite on what behaviours they see rewarded, what behaviours they see punished, and what behaviours the leadership team models. The data is presented back to the exec team anonymously, and it is almost always uncomfortable.

Pattern that shows up repeatedly: The exec team genuinely believes they are modeling the values. The rest of the organisation sees something completely different. The CEO thinks they are approachable and collaborative. The staff see someone who makes all the big decisions in private and then announces them as done. The gap is not dishonesty. The gap is self-awareness.

Helen then facilitates a session where the exec team identifies one or two specific behaviours they are committing to change and makes those commitments public to the organisation. The CFO commits to sharing draft financial reports with the leadership team for input before finalising them, instead of presenting finished reports as fait accompli. The COO commits to running a monthly open Q&A session where any staff member can ask anything. The commitments are small, specific, and public, which makes them hard to ignore.

17. Greg Morrison, Shift Organisational Change

Greg Morrison works with exec teams where a major change initiative has stalled because the middle of the organisation is not moving. The exec team has decided on the change, communicated the change, and cannot understand why six months later most people are still working the old way.

His offsite focus is on building a change coalition, not just a change plan. The exec team identifies 10 to 15 people across the organisation who are respected, influential, and capable of driving change in their areas, and invites them into the offsite as part of the design process rather than the implementation process.

Why this works: Most change initiatives are designed at the top and cascaded down. The middle managers who have to implement the change had no input into the design, do not understand the reasoning, and are being asked to sell something they do not believe in. Bringing them into the offsite shifts them from recipients of the change to co-creators of it, which changes the energy completely.

The offsite becomes a working session where the exec team and the change coalition together identify what has to change, what the barriers are, what the quick wins are, and who owns what. The coalition leaves the offsite with ownership of pieces of the change, not just instructions to execute someone else's plan.

18. Rebecca Ford, Leadership Culture Group

Rebecca Ford facilitates offsites for organisations where the leadership team has lost credibility with the rest of the organisation. Trust is low, cynicism is high, and every new initiative is met with skepticism because the last three initiatives were announced with fanfare and then quietly abandoned.

Her offsite process includes a session called the credibility repair conversation, where the exec team acknowledges specifically where they have let the organisation down, what they are changing, and what people should hold them accountable for. This is not a vague apology. This is naming the specific initiatives that failed, the specific commitments that were not kept, and the specific behaviours that eroded trust.

Why this is hard: Most leadership teams avoid this conversation because it feels like admitting failure. Rebecca's framing is that credibility is not rebuilt by pretending the past did not happen. Credibility is rebuilt by naming what happened, owning the part you played, and demonstrating through sustained behaviour change that the pattern has shifted.

Post-offsite, she works with the exec team to communicate the credibility repair commitments to the organisation in a way that feels honest rather than performative, and to build a 90-day accountability structure where the exec team reports back publicly on whether they kept the commitments.

19. Daniel Kim, Values in Action Facilitation

Daniel Kim runs offsites for exec teams that have recently defined or redefined their organisational values and are now trying to figure out how to make them real. The values are on the wall, on the website, in the onboarding deck, and almost nowhere in the actual decisions the organisation makes.

His offsite design is built around values-based decision case studies. The exec team works through five to ten real decisions the organisation has made in the last 12 months and evaluates whether the decision was aligned with the stated values. A hiring decision. A budget decision. A client decision. A redundancy decision.

What this reveals: Most organisations say they value people, but when budget pressure hits, the first decision is to cut staff rather than reduce executive salaries or delay a capital project. Most organisations say they value quality, but when a client asks for a shortcut, the organisation says yes because the revenue matters more. The values are aspirational, not operational.

Daniel then facilitates a conversation about whether the organisation is willing to make different decisions going forward, and if so, what the decision-making criteria need to be to embed the values into the actual choices the exec team makes. If you genuinely value people, does that mean no redundancies unless the organisation is in financial distress? If you genuinely value quality, does that mean walking away from clients who want you to compromise it?

20. Olivia Grant, Organisational Integrity NZ

Olivia Grant facilitates offsites for exec teams dealing with an integrity breach. Something happened, trust was broken internally or externally, and the exec team is trying to figure out how to rebuild without just moving on and hoping people forget.

Her offsite process starts with a root cause session, where the exec team goes deep on what allowed the breach to happen. Not just who did what, but what systems, incentives, or cultural norms made the behaviour possible or even likely. Most integrity breaches are not the result of one bad actor. They are the result of a system that rewarded or overlooked behaviour that should have been caught earlier.

Example pattern: A sales leader inflates revenue projections to hit a bonus target. The breach is individual, but the root cause is a compensation structure that rewards optimism over accuracy and a culture where missing a forecast feels more dangerous than overstating one.

Olivia then facilitates the design of the structural and cultural changes needed to prevent recurrence. Not just policy changes, but changes to how performance is measured, how transparency is practiced, and how bad news is received. The exec team leaves the offsite with a repair plan that addresses the root cause, not just the symptom.

INNOVATION AND STRATEGIC THINKING OFFSITES

This group of facilitators works with exec teams that are facing disruption, market shifts, or internal stagnation and need to rethink their strategic positioning, their business model, or their approach to innovation. For venue ideas to support this kind of deep work, see our leadership retreat locations guide.

21. Chris Wallace, Future-Focused Strategy

Chris Wallace facilitates offsites for exec teams that are too operationally focused and have stopped thinking strategically about the future. The quarterly exec meetings are consumed by performance reviews and operational problem-solving, and nobody is asking what the organisation should look like in three years or what threats are emerging that are not yet visible in the numbers.

His offsite design includes a session called horizon scanning, where the exec team identifies trends in their sector, their market, and the broader economy that could disrupt the organisation in the next three to five years. Not the trends everyone is already talking about, but the weak signals that most organisations ignore until it is too late.

Structured exploration process: Each exec team member is assigned a specific domain to scan before the offsite: technology shifts, regulatory changes, customer behaviour changes, competitor moves, talent market shifts. They bring their findings to the offsite and the team collectively evaluates which signals are noise and which are early warnings that require strategic response now.

Chris then facilitates a strategy workshop where the exec team designs responses to the most critical signals. If remote work becomes permanent and your org is built around a central office, what changes? If a new competitor enters the market with a lower-cost model, do you compete on price or differentiate on value? The offsite produces a set of strategic bets the organisation is making about the future, with ownership and milestones attached.

22. Angela Brooks, Innovation Lab Facilitation

Angela Brooks works with exec teams that know they need to innovate but have no structured process for it. Innovation happens accidentally when someone has a good idea, rather than systematically as part of how the organisation operates.

Her offsite process introduces a framework for structured innovation that the exec team can take back and embed into their operational rhythm. She uses a model called the innovation portfolio, which categorises innovation into three types: core innovation that improves existing products or services, adjacent innovation that extends into new markets or customer segments, and transformational innovation that creates entirely new business models.

Portfolio balance question: Most organisations spend 95 percent of their innovation energy on core innovation because it feels safer and more immediately valuable. The problem is that core innovation does not protect you from disruption. Adjacent and transformational innovation do, but they require investment in ideas that might fail, which most exec teams are uncomfortable with.

Angela facilitates a session where the exec team decides what their innovation portfolio should look like, how much resource and risk tolerance they are willing to allocate to each category, and who owns driving innovation in each space. The offsite produces an innovation roadmap with specific experiments the organisation is committing to running in the next 12 months.

23. Richard Hughes, Strategic Foresight NZ

Richard Hughes facilitates offsites for exec teams in sectors experiencing rapid change who need to build their strategic foresight capability. His focus is on teaching the exec team to think in scenarios rather than forecasts, which is a fundamentally different cognitive skill.

He runs a session called scenario planning, where the exec team identifies the two or three uncertainties that will most shape the organisation's future and builds four plausible scenarios based on how those uncertainties could play out. Not best case and worst case, but four genuinely different futures that require different strategic responses.

Scenario example for a school: Uncertainty one is whether government funding for independent schools increases or decreases. Uncertainty two is whether parents continue to value in-person education or shift toward hybrid and online models. Four scenarios emerge: high funding and high in-person demand, high funding and shift to hybrid, low funding and high in-person demand, low funding and shift to hybrid. Each scenario requires a different strategy.

Richard then facilitates a session where the exec team identifies what strategic moves are robust across all four scenarios, what moves are specific to one scenario, and what early indicators they should be monitoring to know which scenario is unfolding. The offsite produces a strategy that is adaptive rather than fixed, which is the only kind of strategy that survives volatility.

24. Megan Foster, Disruptive Thinking Workshops

Megan Foster works with exec teams that are stuck in incremental thinking and need to break out of it. The organisation is optimising the current model rather than questioning whether the current model is still the right one.

Her offsite design includes a session called assumption testing, where the exec team lists every major assumption underpinning the current business model and then systematically challenges each one. The assumption that customers will always want to buy this way. The assumption that the current cost structure is sustainable. The assumption that the competitive advantage the organisation has relied on for ten years will still matter in five.

What happens when assumptions break: Most exec teams discover that at least two or three of their core assumptions are already false but the organisation has not adjusted yet. The assumption that customers value face-to-face service has been undermined by customer behaviour data showing that 70 percent of interactions now happen digitally. The organisation is still staffing and budgeting as if in-person is the primary channel.

Megan then facilitates a session where the exec team redesigns the business model without the assumptions that no longer hold. Not as a full pivot, but as a set of strategic experiments that test whether a different model could work better. The offsite produces a pipeline of tests the organisation is running to explore new models before the current model fails.

25. Jonno White, Clarity Group Global

Jonno White facilitates executive offsites in Wellington and internationally for leaders who know their team is capable of more but are stuck in patterns that are hard to name and harder to break. His offsite process is built around surfacing the real issues before the offsite begins, so the time in the room is spent solving problems rather than discovering them.

He works with school leadership teams, nonprofit executives, and corporate leaders who are dealing with talented individuals who cannot seem to work together, strategies that look good on paper but do not translate into action, and unspoken tensions that everyone feels but nobody addresses. His facilitation style is direct, practical, and designed for the 90 days after the offsite, not just the three days during it.

Working Genius integration: Jonno is a Certified Working Genius Facilitator and uses the Working Genius framework to help exec teams understand why certain types of work energise them and others drain them, and how to structure roles and responsibilities around natural energy patterns. He also integrates strategy execution tools, accountability frameworks, and decision-making protocols into the offsite so the team leaves with both insight and infrastructure.

Post-offsite, Jonno runs follow-through sessions at 30, 60, and 90 days to ensure the commitments made during the session are being tracked, the team is holding each other accountable, and the patterns identified during the offsite are actually shifting in the day-to-day work.

Book Jonno White for executive offsites at jonno@consultclarity.org.

Your offsite is not just three days out of the office. It is the intervention that either resets how your leadership team works together or confirms that the patterns you have been living with are permanent.

The difference between an offsite that produces lasting change and one that evaporates by the following Monday is whether the facilitator designs for the room or designs for the 90 days after. The 25 facilitators on this list understand that the real work begins when your team walks back into the building and has to execute on what was agreed. For more on finding the right executive offsite facilitator in New Zealand, see also our Melbourne executive offsite facilitators list.