Consulting Services

Leadership Training

You need to support your people to operate in a new way; to give them the tools to co-create their future together.

ICAA has an extensive curriculum of courses designed for every level of the organization

From “facilitative leaders” to project managers and team leaders, the entire Technology of Participation™ body of knowledge is accessible through the training we provide in-house to your staff.

Transformation Engagement

ICA Associates Inc

Transforming an entire organization requires skills development, subtle insights into human behaviour, and strategic and whole-system thinking—yours and everyone else’s, too. 

Teamwork and collaboration with internal and external stakeholders require solid group process skills. 

ICA Associates Inc. equips your teams to succeed at every level of the organization, from constructive conversations and productive meetings to strategic thinking and system analysis. 

Features of ICAA’s private, in-house training

Adult Learning Principles and Processes
  • Demonstrate (have an experience).
  • Debrief the experience to expose or ground the lesson.
  • Deepen understanding with theory, tools, Q&A, and storytelling.
  • Practice, practice, practice!
    Reflect on practice to consolidate lessons learned from everyone.
Excellent Manuals and Materials
  • Short readings you can use with your clients.
  • Canvases and templates to collect your thoughts onto.
  • Step-by-step reminders of processes.
  • Photos and illustrations and examples of results.
  • Long excerpts to help you get back inside it.
  • Resources to research.
Choice of Modes of Delivery
  • In-person, in-class, traditional
  • Live online (synchronous)
  • Self-directed (asynchronous)
  • Self-directed with coaching and feedback
  • (No “hybrid” option at the moment)
Professional Competency Based
  • Courses recognized by the International Association of Facilitators (IAF)
  • IAF’s Certified Professional Facilitator (CPF) competency model.
  • IAF’s Statement of Ethics and Values supported and studied.
  • ICA’s Certified ToP Methods Facilitator (CTF) competency model.
  • We encourage our grads to join IAF, receive coaching, and get certified
Real-Life Experience
  • All our trainers are certified professional facilitators (CTF and/or CPF).
  • All our trainers actually use the tools and methods they teach.
Skills That Last a Lifetime
  • Group process design and facilitation skills are extremely transferable across roles and organizations, throughout a career, and even at home
  • They are assumed in most job descriptions these days, but very few people actually study the topics, so it adds a lot of value to a resume and increases your likelihood of success.

Who Benefits from ICAA Leadership Training

Employers often invite ICA Associates Inc. to train dozens or even hundreds of staff. Sometimes, training is related to ongoing consulting work because the organization is trying to become more collaborative. Here are some examples:

  • Public Health Departments train all their nursing staff to become facilitators of health promotion groups because one-on-one counseling is too slow to have a population-scale impact.
  • Indigenous community organizations train all their younger members to facilitate because it dramatically boosts engagement of all ages and backgrounds in a style that aligns with community values. This helps them to become future leaders.
  • Quasi-governmental organizations train all their planning staff to facilitate participatory project management and teamwork. This is because the old command-and-control style of management alienated new generations of employees, who see themselves as valuable equals and refused to just do as they were told.
  • Financial services industry leaders train all their staff to facilitate group processes with greater confidence and expertise in order to apply agile principles to their work and stay ahead of the competition.
  • Urban design and planning companies train their staff to facilitate dynamic and interactive public meetings, stakeholder conversations, and project teams in order to develop plans that reflect community values and therefore pass through approval processes faster.
  • Information Technology departments and companies train all their staff to build consensus and lead meetings that elicit the actual requirements of client groups with less guesswork and fewer iterations that just end up dragging projects on forever.
  • National NGOs with a mandate to have an impact on a particular topic need to collaborate with other NGOs, governments, companies, associations, and agencies across the country and around the world. If the word “coalition” or “partnership” is in the name then you need to train all their staff how to facilitate.
  • Provincial government ministries that navigate sensitive internal and external stakeholder relationships train large cohorts of managers and coordinators to be more facilitative in their approach, improving collaboration, communication, and speed.

Continued Development After Training

Turn Excitement into Expertise with ICA Associates Inc.

Our graduates leave our courses energized and eager to learn more—why not keep the momentum going?

Explore our publicly available programs to build on their success and deepen their facilitation skills.

Looking to train an entire team of internal facilitators? Enhance their professionalism and set them on the path to professional certification by adding some key courses to their development plan.

Facilitating Client Collaboration (FCC) focuses on the diagnosis, design, and preparation stage of a facilitation process. It is a tremendous act of empathy to understand a whole group’s needs and not insert your own nor assume the boss’ instructions were accurate or even firm. So what does this group of people need at this point in their journey?

Transformational Strategy (TS) is a natural next step after GFM because it takes the two core methodologies and customises them to create a strategic thinking process, a participatory environmental scanning process, and a participatory (team) action planning that creates short term goals and the commitment to accomplish them.

Additional Leadership Training Resources

Go beyond classroom and instructor-led learning with insights direct from our experts; Jo Nelson, one of the founders of ICA Associates Inc. and is principal shareholder of the company.

Get cutting-edge insights built out over decades of experience working with public and private sectors.

Chapter 13 of the book Getting to the Bottom of ToP

Charting, or reverse engineering a curriculum.

What Our Clients Say

Each participatory process ICA Associates Inc has designed for us, including board strategic planning, a large-scale Inuit community priority-establishing project, and the Commission on the Future of Health Care in Canada consultation, has been respectful and productive with powerful commitment to results from diverse groups

Richard Jock Executive Director, National Aboriginal Health Organisation

ICA Associates led us on a thoughtful and productive Leadership Retreat that helped us more deeply connect and get to know each another better after the complexities of remote work during the pandemic. The DiSC styles helped us grow in deeper appreciation of each other’s strengths and in how we come to reaching decisions and actioning next steps. We were able to weave our insights from the two days into a team agreement to help guide us, as we continue to move forward together in fulfillment of our organizational mission and align closely as one integrated team in support of the wider organization.

Management Team WILL Employment Solutions, Your Content Goes Here

In a few short years MPAC has transformed from an “unchanging” institution with an assigned mandate and rote routines to an innovative, collaborative, and pro-active organization.

Anthoni Wisniowski President, Municipal Property Assessment Corporation

ICA Associates Inc. lead our strategic planning. It was so effective that we had them look at and enhance all of our program planning and evaluation processes.

Dr. Robert Kyle Commissioner and Medical Officer of Health, The Regional Municipality of Durham

Our project resulted in “uncontentious structural change” in a major institution, and a shift from top-down decision-making and silos toward a collaborative culture. Action plans are being carried out, with public progress reports at regular intervals.

Julia O'Sullivan Ontario Insitute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto

Don’t take our word for it

We love sharing in our customers’ success, and they love sharing their stories. Read case studies from agencies, brands, publishers and businesses of every shape and size to find out how they drive real growth with our solutions.

Alzheimers Society Of Ontario

Alzheimers Society Of Ontario

ASIO represents 30 local Alzheimer societies across Ontario. ASIO needed a new long range strategy plan but needed it to represent ...

James Bay Cree Governance

James Bay Cree Governance

Nearly 1000 people from 10 Cree communities and 4 cities participated in creating a set of values and recommendations for governme ...

Municipal Property Assessment Corporation

Municipal Property Assessment Corporation

MPAC transformed itself from a traditional hierarchy into a collaborative organization focusing on innovation. What began as an em ...

Toronto Drug Strategy Initiative

Toronto Drug Strategy Initiative

Drug use and abuse is viewed differently by advocates of prevention, treatment, harm reduction and enforcement. The City of Toront ...