Maison Marnis
For universities, research organisations and policy bodies navigating a world that demands more from their leaders.
Higher education is under pressure — from disinformation, from politics, from the shifting expectations of researchers and society. The leaders who will shape what comes next need more than management training. They need grounding in how knowledge works when enacted, how institutions function under pressure, and how to act with clarity under complexity.
That capacity has a name. The ancient Greeks called it phronesis - practical wisdom. It is what Maison Marnis is built around.
Margaux Kersschot, PhD
Margaux Kersschot, PhD, has spent over a decade working at the heart of European higher education — not as an observer, but as someone who built things.
She was the architect behind the doctoral learning model adopted by the YUFE alliance — a collaboration of ten European universities — and spent years as a policy expert on doctoral and postdoctoral training at the University of Antwerp. Her work sits at the intersection of how research institutions are structured, how researchers are developed, and what leadership aimed at true impact in that world actually requires.
She has worked at the European level on doctoral policy and researcher representation, and brings both the academic rigour and the institutional experience to understand what universities genuinely need — as opposed to what generic leadership programmes assume they need.
She now channels that experience into the International Leadership Programme, co-developed with Adoc Talent Management, and into consultancy.
Flagship offering: The international leadership programme
x Adoc Talent Management
In partnership with Adoc Talent Management, Margaux co-leads and co-develops the International Leadership Programme — a research-grounded programme for university leaders designed to build the strategic, intercultural and institutional capabilities that modern higher education demands.
For: (vice) rectors, deans, senior faculty, research managers, doctoral school directors.
This program equips current and future academic leaders with the analytical frameworks, governance tools and leadership capabilities required to steer universities in a context marked by the marketization of higher education, geopolitical competition in science, societal expectations, and internal organizational tensions.
The Maison Marnis difference
Maison Marnis — House of Practical Wisdom — is built on the conviction that leadership development is about character formation, not just about tools or frameworks. What kind of leader do you want to be?
Margaux designed the doctoral learning model and its piloting phase for the YUFE European university alliance, and co-developed the YUFE4Postdocs training programme across ten institutions. In that work, she operated as a broker between researchers, management and policy — across levels of seniority, across institutions, across national contexts.
That is the experience she brings here.
Tying knowledge to action, and actions to values.
The name Maison Marnis — House of Practical Wisdom — reflects a conviction that the most important question in any institution is not just what we know, but what we do with it.
In a world of information overload, political pressure on knowledge institutions, and growing complexity in researcher careers, society needs leaders who can act with both rigour and practical wisdom.
That is what this work is about — leadership development built from experience within and beyond the world of research and higher education.
A Parallel Initiative
Mini Marnis - for families
Practical wisdom doesn't begin at the university. It begins at the dinner table, in the playground, in the small daily moments where children learn how to be in the world with others.
Mini Marnis brings the same foundational values — respect, clarity, civic engagement — to workshops for children and families. From playful ethi-quette sessions for young children to reflective conversations for parents, it is an extension of the same core belief: that navigating today's social world well requires tools, not just good intentions.