Major programme leadership & governance
Anton Palmer applies programme thinking to live property and care ventures: governance, sequencing, risk, stakeholder alignment, decision gates and accountability. He has run long-horizon programmes across finance, property and regulated care for two decades, from Cheltenham, Gloucestershire, and is now studying the discipline formally at Oxford.
MSc Major Programme Management, University of Oxford, Saïd Business School, studied alongside the programmes he is running In progress, 2026 to 2028
Long programmes turn on a small number of things: who owns which decision, in what order those decisions are taken, and what evidence is required before each one. Anton Palmer makes all three explicit from the start.
01
Before committing to anything significant he writes down the conditions that would have to hold for it to work. It separates facts from assumptions, surfaces weak logic early, and lets a later review show whether the decision was wrong or the conditions changed.
02
Reversible decisions are made quickly, with assumptions recorded so they can be revisited. Irreversible ones are given more time deliberately: evidence gathered, specialists brought in, challenge invited, because they set the shape of everything that follows.
03
On acquisitions and developments that means treating title, planning, funding, regulation and downside scenarios as separate hurdles, each cleared on its own terms, rather than a single bundled judgement made under time pressure.
Clarity. People can cope with difficult objectives if they understand what matters, what good looks like and who is responsible.
Anton Alexander Palmer
He began the Oxford MSc in 2026, decades into a career already spent on exactly this. Its focus areas are major programme leadership, corporate governance, strategic delivery and institutional risk frameworks, and he applies them to live acquisitions and planning decisions rather than treating the programme as time away from the work.
He treats continuing education as part of executive practice. Complexity compounds, and good judgement includes knowing when to keep learning rather than assuming experience alone is enough. He tests a decision against whether he could explain it openly to colleagues and advisers.
Current
A group of CQC-regulated care businesses, where title, funding and regulatory questions are being cleared separately from the commercial case and early enough to shape it.
January 2026 to 2030
A multi-stage planning programme in Green Belt and AONB designations, where the earliest decisions shape the whole build-out through to 2030.
