Your audience will vote, laugh, argue —
and never see their systems the same way again.
Sessions for safety, HR, and public-sector leaders, built by a thirty-year operations and emergency services veteran. Live voting from every phone in the room. Real diagnoses. Thirty-day commitments that actually happen.
Twenty minutes about your event — fit, format, and fee. Straight answers.
The Ghost, The Hero, and The Alibi
Why safety systems that look perfect on paper fail in the field.
Every organization’s systems are haunted by three characters: the Ghost (it exists on paper, not on the floor), the Hero (one person carries the whole thing), and the Alibi (it produces paper, not protection — built to answer, not to act). Once your people can name them, they see them everywhere.
- A true story from the apparatus bay that every safety professional recognizes in their own building
- Call the Process — the live game where everyone votes from their phone, results fill the big screen in real time, and the room discovers it can’t agree on its own processes. That disagreement is the lesson.
- The line they’ll quote in the parking lot: the auditor finds the alibi, the incident finds the ghost, the resignation letter finds the hero
- A prize draw, a leaderboard, and a shared vocabulary your organization will never shake
The Ghost Hunt
The keynote diagnoses. The workshop treats.
Your teams hunt the three characters inside their own organization — then apply one concrete treatment to each:
- The Ghost gets an owner. A name, not a department.
- The Hero gets One Source of Truth. Tables map everything their indispensable people carry, stress-test it (what happens the week they’re on vacation?), and convert “one person has the truth” into “one source of truth” — while honouring the heroes, not replacing them. We’re taking the weight off them.
- The Alibi gets a purpose — or a funeral. One form rebuilt so it changes behaviour. One form retired with honours. Retiring a useless form is a safety improvement — possibly the most popular one you’ll make all year.
Every table leaves with three named, dated, thirty-day commitments — and I follow up at day 25 to ask how they landed. Proof, not paperwork: the vacation test, the stranger test, the two-minute find.
Start the conversation →Fees, in the open
Travel is included within the Edmonton–Calgary–Fort McMurray corridor. Beyond it, travel is billed at cost and agreed in advance — no surprises on the invoice. Fees are fixed in writing when the date is held; there is no hourly billing and no day-of extras. All fees are exclusive of GST. Association and non-profit rates on request.
The first ten bookings get more in the room.
Five signed copies of Eight Dimensions of Leadership Excellence and CivicShift challenge coins for your door draw — in exchange for a written testimonial and permission to film a short clip. Same fee, more for your people, and you help me build the highlight reel. Fair trade.
The fee does not move. If I publish a testimonial that came out of this arrangement, it will say so alongside the quote.
Thirty years in private and public operations — oil rig floors and a mill finishing line, then twenty-three years at the Regional Municipality of Wood Buffalo: twenty in emergency services, rising to Assistant Deputy Chief of Training, then three as Program Manager, Human Resources & Safety. Union floor and exempt leadership, both sides of the table. Led the project that earned Wood Buffalo the 2021 Minister’s Award for Municipal Excellence, Enhancing Community Safety.
Author of Eight Dimensions of Leadership Excellence — the same eight dimensions behind every CivicShift assessment, so the language your people learn in the room is the language the measurement uses. MIT Sloan executive certificate, Artificial Intelligence: Implications for Business Strategy.
I’ve filled out the sign-in sheets. I’ve been the hero carrying the process. I’ve watched institutions lose their memory one retirement party at a time. This material isn’t theory — it’s a field report, told so your people recognize their own building in it.
AI can’t fix a mess. We find out which one you have.
A talk changes the conversation. A measurement changes the budget.
If the room agrees there is a problem and somebody asks how big it is, that is a different engagement — and it uses the same eight dimensions your people just learned. The New Leader Baseline reads the whole organization: leaders, council, staff and core documents. The HR & Safety Program Review measures one program three ways: what leadership says is in place, what the evidence shows, and what your crews actually experience.
No obligation either way. Plenty of organizations book the talk and stop there, and that is a perfectly good outcome.
Program to fill? Safety day to plan? PD budget to spend well?
Tell me the date and the room, and I’ll tell you exactly what I’d run in it — twenty minutes, no obligation, straight answers on fit, format, and fee.
Book a conversation troy.palmer@civicshiftai.com · 780-792-7227