About

Adelee Penner, BHEc, BEd, MEd, PhD Candidate, is a researcher, educational consultant, and system leader whose work focuses on helping people and organizations navigate complexity, strengthen professional practice, and create meaningful improvement. As the founder and CEO of Elk Willow Consulting, Adelee works alongside school authorities, educational leaders, organizations, and professional teams across Canada and internationally to design learning, facilitate change, and build the capacity to respond thoughtfully to an uncertain future.

Adelee brings a distinctive combination of practical leadership experience and research-informed practice to her work. Her career has included roles as a teacher, school and system leader, Assistant Superintendent, provincial education leader, and consultant. She has worked within school authorities in Manitoba and Alberta and with Alberta Education and Manitoba Agriculture, giving her experience with improvement and innovation from the classroom to the provincial policy level.

Adelee is an Assistant Lecturer in the Faculty of Education at the University of Alberta, where she works with graduate students in educational leadership. She is also a PhD candidate in Educational Research at the University of Calgary’s Werklund School of Education. Her research explores scenario planning, futures thinking, innovation literacy, complexity-informed leadership, and professional learning—particularly how leaders can develop the mindsets, language, and processes needed to make sense of complex conditions and make thoughtful decisions about what comes next.

Research and practice are intentionally connected in Adelee’s work. Rather than bringing organizations predetermined solutions, she creates processes that help people examine evidence, challenge assumptions, make their thinking visible, and design responses that make sense within their own context. Her work frequently explores instructional leadership, assessment, professional judgment, organizational learning, wellbeing, implementation, stakeholder engagement, and leading through complexity and change.

Adelee’s experience extends beyond education. Her early professional work with Manitoba Agriculture and subsequent projects related to food security, agricultural diversification, innovation, and emerging markets strengthened her understanding of complex systems and reinforced a perspective that continues to influence her work today: meaningful innovation rarely comes from a single solution. It emerges through curiosity, collaboration, evidence, experimentation, and the willingness to see possibilities others may not yet see.

An IAP2-certified trainer with additional experience in mental health literacy, public engagement, and policy and system planning, Adelee brings multiple lenses to complex organizational challenges. She is particularly interested in spaces with no obvious answer—where leaders must bring people together, interpret competing sources of evidence, navigate uncertainty, and decide what is worth trying next.

At the heart of Adelee’s work is a belief that the future is not something organizations simply prepare for—it is something people can influence. Through Elk Willow Consulting, she works alongside leaders and teams to strengthen that capacity: creating the conditions for thoughtful inquiry, courageous experimentation, collective learning, and better possibilities for the people they serve.