Overview

Nesta’s new strategy sets an exciting and ambitious goal: over the next decade we will design, test and scale innovations that improve millions of lives. To do this, Nesta will pursue three innovation ‘Missions’:

• Equalising Life Chances (ensuring the circumstances of your birth do not dictate the trajectory of your life)

• Healthy Lives (increasing the number of years lived in good health)

• Sustainable Economic Recovery (accelerating the transition to a net-zero economy that works better for people and the planet)

To deliver on this strategy will require Nesta to be focused - going deep and staying the course in a few areas - while remaining flexible enough to find new and better ways of achieving our goals and to capitalise on outsized opportunities for impact as they arise. The newly-formed Strategy Unit, in which the position of Senior Strategy Analyst sits, will play a central role in ensuring Nesta finds the right balance in this and other critical areas. It will help others in the organisation to surface and resolve issues of strategic importance and will work in a cross-departmental way to give Nesta the best possible chance of achieving the ambitions of our strategy. The Senior Strategy Analyst role is a shared position with the CEO’s Office and will have a dotted reported line into the Chief of Staff for that work (estimated to take up approximately 50% of the Senior Strategy Analyst’s time).

The Strategy Unit will help Nesta understand its progress against the strategy and surface and synthesise information for ongoing decision-making. This includes monitoring strategic alignment; facilitating decisions about misalignment; and driving changes in strategic intent as circumstances evolve. The team will also take on special projects - originating from the CSO, CEO, Executive Team or the Strategy Unit’s own analysis - structuring and solving internal problems and capturing opportunities.

The Strategy Unit will be part of a wider Strategy Department, led by the Chief Strategy Officer (CSO), which includes a Discovery Hub (helping Nesta remain at the cutting edge of innovation and find new and better ways of achieving our goals through exploratory work) and a Venture Studio (creating new companies and institutions that have the potential to ‘change the game’ in Nesta’s areas of focus). The Strategy Department overall will sit at the heart of Nesta, working closely alongside Mission teams (which work directly on programmes to achieve our three Missions), Practice teams (experts in areas such as data science, design, evidence and experimentation) and others to ensure Nesta’s strategic intent is lived out in practice. The department will contribute directly to the achievement of Nesta’s Missions and its work will help keep Nesta at the forefront of innovation for social good. 

The Role

This role is shared between the Strategy Unit and the Office of the CEO. The successful candidate will work both on strategy and also on special projects and initiatives for the CEO, reporting into the Chief of Staff (dotted line) for this work.

The Strategy Unit will be a small, driven, close-knit team who will work collaboratively to collectively deliver on the team’s aims and objectives. Therefore, the post-holder will be expected to work flexibly with the rest of the team, prioritising deliverables as they are required by the Head of Strategy, CSO and the rest of the organisation. This team will be primarily internally facing, and will be high-profile within Nesta, meaning that team members have a lot of access to information and senior leadership, and that the work will be fast paced, sometimes with short deadlines.

Examples of responsibilities and deliverables for a Strategy Analyst within the team include:

• Supporting delivery of the Strategy Unit’s regular reports on “organisational health”, supporting multiple components of these reports such as finance, impact, operations, strategic alignment. 

• Input into key organisational forums such as strategy refreshes, business planning, budget allocation or annual reporting cycles. This will include supporting drafting final outputs (e.g. the business plan) as well as materials to facilitate Executive-level conversations.

• Supporting Strategy Unit special projects originating from the CSO, Executive Team or the Unit’s own analysis. This includes scoping work, qualitative and quantitative reviews, presenting options and recommendations, creating delivery plans and handover materials to operationalise next steps. 

• Working as part of the CEO’s office to deliver on special projects and initiatives of priority to the CEO and Chief of Staff.  Examples of special projects could include e.g.: development of Nesta’s position on a high-priority issue such as Covid-19 or a HMG Spending Review, and/or internal projects to help address challenges and improve organisational effectiveness.

• Supporting continuous improvement reviews to ensure the team are learning from our experiences and improving our ways of working as part of business as usual. 

The vision for the Strategy Unit is a small team who work collaboratively to support Nesta to be the best organisation it can be. The team will do this by providing an impartial perspective on performance, working centrally to have a cross-cutting, high-level view of the whole organisation, asking the right questions at the right times, and being action-oriented to proactively support others to find and implement solutions. As a core member of the team you will play an important role in helping the organisation develop, and ultimately to achieve its Missions.

The Person

Essential skills and experience

• Experience of Strategy - Experience working on organisational strategy, either through management consultancy, or through an internal strategy role. 

• Experience of project-based work - You have experience working on challenging, multifaceted problems with multiple senior stakeholders and no obvious answer. 

• Problem solving - You have a proven ability to take ownership of a major component of a complex problem, break it down into logically distinct pieces and shape the work into manageable deliverables. 

• Hypothesis-driven - You have knowledge of problem solving tools and approaches and are able to apply them appropriately. You are comfortable working iteratively in a hypothesis-driven way. 

• Strong multidisciplinary analytical skills including quantitative and qualitative skills - the whole team needs to be fluent in basic analysis techniques in order to support key deliverables such as quarterly internal reports on organisational health. This includes competence with spreadsheets (ability to conduct basic analysis and willingness to learn intermediate skills e.g. pivot tables) and PowerPoint/Google Slides (for communicating ideas and structuring options). 

• Excellent communication skills - experience delivering high quality written and verbal outputs and a demonstrated ability to synthesise complex issues into clear and concise messages for a senior audience. 

• Forward thinking, planning and independent, collaborative working - you are able to work proactively to identify critical dependencies that impact both your work and the broader priorities of the organisation. You have a demonstrated ability to work independently and deliver outputs on time and to high quality, collaborating with others and prioritising workload based on competing demands. 

Desirable skills and experience

• Working knowledge of operations such as communications, legal, finance, HR, systems and processes - the team will work closely with these functions and it is desirable that team members understand this context  and are able to proactively drive discussions.

• Experience of inputting to corporate documentation such as business plans, annual reports, budget plans, board papers. 

• Experience in facilitating strategic discussions, for example including Board meetings, Executive away days, team strategy planning events.

How to Apply

To apply for this role, please complete the application form by 16 November 2020, 10am.

At Nesta, we believe that a diverse workforce leads to an organisation that is more innovative, more creative and gets better results.

We want our workforce to represent the diversity of the people and communities we serve. We also want our workplace to be one where different experiences, expertise and perspectives are valued, and where everyone is encouraged to grow and develop.

This means that when we are recruiting, we actively seek to reach a diverse pool of candidates. It also means that we are happy to consider any reasonable adjustments that potential employees may need to in order to be successful.

We recognise the importance of a good balance between work and home life, so we do everything we can to accommodate flexible working, including working from home, compressed or part-time hours, job shares and other arrangements. 

Please just let us know in your application or at any stage throughout the process (and beyond) if these are options you’d like to explore. 

Please note: After the job advert closes, your answers will go through a sift process: randomising and anonymising answers for taking out individual information that biases hiring decisions and facilitating us to review each answer by more than one person so you can benefit from the wisdom of the crowds. People scoring the applications will not have seen your CV at this stage so please try your best to answer questions without rephrasing your CV, they will see this later! More about the principles behind the blind review process.