Some organisations don't need another consultant. They need the right room.
The Athenae convenes accomplished women from deliberately different worlds around one significant question: yours.
There has never been more access to expertise, and rarely less access to judgement. Analysis is easy to buy and getting cheaper. What is scarce is the conversation that tests a significant decision from angles your own sector cannot supply.
The room most organisations can assemble is narrower than it looks. The same disciplines, the same career paths, the same assumptions arrived at separately and confirmed together. The Athenae exists to put a different room within reach.
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The Athenae convenes accomplished women whose experience runs across sectors, disciplines and kinds of work. Women who have bought, built, regulated, funded and led. That judgement becomes more valuable when it is brought together, and bringing it together is what we do for organisations.
THE ATHENAE ADVISORY
Bring us your complex challenges
The Athenae Advisory works with organisations across health and life sciences. We take your question and convene a small group of experienced people to work through it with you. Each group combines people who understand your sector with people from other fields who have faced comparable challenges.
We create the conditions for fresh thinking, productive challenge and practical options. You leave with clearer choices and a stronger basis for deciding what to do next.
IS THIS YOU?
The questions organisations bring us
Your challenge might involve people, funding, competition, growth or a strategy that isn't delivering. Whether you are planning something new or trying to move a stalled project forward, the group helps you see what is holding progress back and what your options are.
“Our strategy has been agreed, but it isn't delivering.”
“We need to grow, and doing more of the same won't get us there.”
“A competitor is gaining ground and we need a different response.”
“We're restructuring and need the change to hold.”
“Our funding model has to change.”
“We have a promising product or programme that isn't being taken up.”
Experience you can't search for
People who have built businesses, led teams and delivered change recognise patterns and possibilities that may be hard to see from inside your organisation. The value lies in choosing the right people for your question and creating a useful conversation between them.
HOW ENGAGEMENTS WORK
Three steps, from your question to your options
We start with your question
What you want to achieve, what is getting in the way and what you need to decide.
We agree the scope
Together, we agree the question the group will work on and what you will receive.
We convene the right group
A small group with relevant experience from health and other fields. You know who is involved and why their experience matters.
You receive a concise written account of what emerged. You decide what to do with it, and you lead the work that follows.
WAYS TO WORK TOGETHER
Choose the shape that fits your question
TWO TO FOUR WEEKS
A Strategic Sprint
A time-limited process for examining your question together and producing agreed insights and options. For example, a launch and adoption readiness sprint examines the gaps between your current position and your intended launch.
You receive a concise written account of:
- Your priorities
- The practical options open to you
- The questions and evidence still outstanding
- Where the group's views differed
FOR A LARGER QUESTION
A series of sessions
For a larger question, the group meets at several points, so you can test your thinking as your own work develops.
ALONGSIDE YOU
Ongoing advice
An experienced, independent view alongside your leadership team over time.
IN THEIR WORDS
“Lynn has a rare ability to see the whole strategic picture, know exactly who needs to be in the room, bring them together and translate complexity into a credible programme of action.”
Professor Phil Chowienczyk
President, British and Irish Hypertension Society
“What stood out was their ability to make sense of complexity, bring the right people around the table and turn discussion into action.”
Professor Toby Richards
Chair, IRONlife
The Strategic Sprint
Convened judgement around one significant question, in weeks not months.
Some questions are too significant to answer solely from inside one organisation, and too particular for a standard advisory process. A Strategic Sprint begins by sharpening the question. Over two to four weeks, from scoping to final written synthesis, The Athenae selects and briefs five to seven accomplished women for the relevance and useful distance between their experience, usually including a perspective from outside your sector.
The session is confidential with individual contributions not attributed outside it. Within five working days you receive a concise written synthesis: where the group agreed, where perspectives differed, the risks it identified and the choices it would test next. A debrief conversation closes the Sprint.
A Sprint is not built around a pre-sold solution or an implementation mandate. Material interests are declared, and any follow-on work is handled separately and transparently.
What a Sprint is not:
Unlike a conventional consulting engagement, a Strategic Sprint is bounded around decision quality. It does not arrive with a predetermined framework, a pre-packaged solution or an implementation mandate, and it does not stay on after the synthesis. Nor is it a roundtable: the room is built, not gathered.
Organisations tend to come to us at one of two moments: early, while a significant decision is still forming, or late, to pressure-test a decision before it becomes expensive. Both are good reasons.
How an engagement begins
It starts with a conversation. Thirty minutes of discovery, no obligation, and no preparation needed beyond the question itself. Questions usually leave that call sharper than they arrived, and if a Sprint is not the right instrument, we will say so.
Tell us what you're trying to achieve.
Whether you are exploring The Athenae for yourself or for your organisation, we would love to hear from you
Contact [email protected]
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