What We Do
Whatever the size of the challenge, we start with the people. We develop top teams and Boards, guide organisations through change, and coach individual leaders. We offer Avanti Profiles to build self-awareness, and engagement and co-production to bring in the voices that matter. Our signature programmes, masterclasses and Avanti Academy let you learn with us in person or online. It is all built on nearly 30 years of practice in the public, private and voluntary sectors.
Our services
Top Team and Board DevelopmentFor executive teams, cabinets, boards and chairs.
Profiles, facilitated sessions, away days and follow-through for the people at the top. We help senior teams and boards build the trust, candour and shared purpose that good decisions depend on, drawing on doctoral research into top team leadership and years of work with cabinets, chief executives and chairs. Relationship before structure: governance only holds when the relationships beneath it are sound.
Organisational ChangeThrough reorganisation, recovery and reform.
Culture, integration and change programmes for organisations at their most demanding moments: local government reorganisation, new combined and strategic authorities, corporate joint committees, improvement and recovery, mergers, shared services and new ways of working. We work with you from the case for change, through design, to implementation: strengths-based, bespoke every time, and keeping people with you along the way.
Signature Programmes and MasterclassesWith us in the room.
Our highest-value programmes blend Avanti Academy with live learning: practitioners who have done it, a cohort of peers small enough to trust, a real assignment you build and keep, and the two of us in the room. Six-week masterclasses, a political leadership residential academy, top team development and a leaders' circle.
Avanti AcademyNarrated online learning, written from practice.
Topics from leadership and management to governance, public service and housing, taken whole or in parts, from a free Taster to a certificated programme. Learn on your own, as a team, or across a whole organisation with a licence.
CoachingExecutive, political, team and wellbeing coaching.
One-to-one and team coaching from coaches qualified across a wide range of approaches rather than a single school: executive, political, performance and solution-focused, behavioural, team and systemic, mindfulness and wellbeing, and life and career. We have coached for more than twenty years, from first-line supervisors to chief executives, with a grounding in the Tavistock tradition of group relations and reflective practice.
Avanti ProfilesTen profiles of our own. Not a verdict, a starting point.
Avanti Profiles hold up a careful mirror to individuals, teams, organisations and whole systems, and give people a shared language for talking about difference. Every item is our own wording, written for public service: Cultural Dimensions, Leadership Behaviours 360, Leadership Preferences, Strategic Team Behaviours, Development Framework Profile, Role Lens and Team Climate. They describe, never diagnose, and they are never used for selection, pay or performance decisions. The thinking behind them draws on a wide body of work we acknowledge in one place.
We are also licensed to use established instruments including Hogan, MBTI®, SDI and Thomas-Kilmann.
Engagement and Co-productionWith staff, residents and communities.
Moving beyond consultation to genuine partnership. Led by Dr Amanda Milliner, whose doctoral research examined how institutions hear the voices least often heard, we help organisations engage staff, residents, customers and communities, so that the people closest to a service help to shape it.
Let us help you, your team, and your organisation move forwards
Tell us what you are facing. Jon or Amanda will reply personally within two working days.