Head of Sense Making, Data and Insights

Key Responsibilities for the job

Leading and developing SmartStart’s network-wide approach(es) to monitoring & feedback as well as sense-making for appropriate action

This entails

·        leading coherent target-setting by network management

·        reviewing, revising and developing coherent, fit-for-purpose indicators and dashboards as appropriate to particular roles & contexts

·        Sense-making: people’s iteratively interpreting data to make sense of experience & environment

o   Sense-making entails navigating, way-finding, figuring out, explaining, narrating, etc.

o   Sense-making is what precedes, informs & follows decision-making and/or action-taking

o   Sense-making is individual-and-social and ongoing, and oriented to flexibly appropriate action

·        Recording-&-reporting: regular performance recording-&-reporting for Hub & network (incl. mgmt.)

o   Preparing a core performance report quarterly (incl. Extended annual report at year-end) appropriate for funders

·        Appropriate action: responding appropriately in context, including improving and/or innovating

·        Reflecting: guiding & supporting reflective practice

Leading SmartStart’s using and managing data and information as resources for sense-making and decision-making across the network and platform as well as the ecosystem

This entails:

·        Leading the ongoing introduction and improvement of data management and governance across the network (with the IT Head). And, in complement, leading the reorienting of the data function from a black box service to a partner activating, amplifying, and enabling distributed data use & management

·        Leading iterative assessment of key data assets, opportunities & needs, capabilities, and risks

·        Maintaining a map or maps of key data sets, their sources, and designated owners

·        Guiding and supporting improving data:

o   ethics and relevant compliance (including but not limited to POPIA)

o   availability & accessibility 

o   capturing & collection

o   integrity & quality (incl. accuracy, consistency, and reliability) 

o   usability for sense-making & decision-making 

o   security and compliance with associated regulations

·       This includes introducing & supporting the use of relevant tools, guides, processes etc that are user-friendly for data owners & stewards (eg. a data set useability & hygiene checklists)

·       Fostering a data-engaged culture

Leading SmartStart’s strategic approach to the big picture information and data systems as resources for sense-making and decision-making across the network and platform as well as the ecosystem (with key partners, including Ilifa Labantwana, DBE and National Treasury)

·        Mapping and managing population data & using this in guiding multi-year and annual planning, targeting, and projections — including scenarios and/or futures thinking as apt

·        Leading development of SmartStart’s data systems to cohere productively with relevant state and other data systems (including but not limited to eCares) and partners (including but not limited to the national department of basic education and Ilifa)

·        Attending to other strategically significant information as this emerges and evolves

Leading the central insights function, including leading rapid learning through iterative experimenting and short-term studies

This includes leading and co-creating rapid learning projects

·        Rapid learning: learning through fast feedback loops and from & with others

·        Iterative experimenting: trying things, with discipline and rigor, to learn

·        Short-term studies: focused investigations to answer specific questions over a few weeks or months, whether through analysis of existing data, fieldwork, or both

·        Collective intelligence: sharing information, insights and/or know-how and surfacing what emerges

·        Reflective practice: asking questions & questioning assumptions about one’s own work and ways of working (standing on the balcony outside the dance, double-loop learning, reflexivity, etc)

Collaborating with the Research, Reflection & Evaluation Head and wider Innovation & Learning portfolio team in

·        Developing an apt research & evaluation agenda for SmartStart and conceptualizing research and/or evaluation questions, studies, and terms of reference, etc.

·        Making SmartStart’s practice more reflective

·        Creating knowledge from SmartStart people’s experience and expertise

Practicing and exemplifying systems thinking-and-doing, including societal thinking-and-doing

Collaboratively Guiding the SmartStart Hub & network of partners + Developing Professionally

·        Co-realising SmartStart’s strategy by managing strategically

·        Seeing and sharing the big picture coherently: co-building & communicating coherence unending

·        Creating the conditions for and facilitating people’s thinking diversely and doing good work together

o   Leading as a learner-and-teacher

·        Practicing SmartStart’s “purple practices” for collective success, incl. but not limited to:

o   Behaving trustworthily and building trusting relationships

o   Playing roles across contexts adaptively

o   Co-creating our thinking environment and nurturing our psychological safety

o   Learning curiously (and unlearning to learn)

o   Asking for & giving reasons (account-giving / accountability)

o   Managing by coaching (and asking “How can I help you?”)

·        Developing self and systems doing-and-thinking

To be developed and contracted in due course

Key Person Specifications

Qualifications and Experience

·       Min. masters degree or equivalent in a relevant field

·       Min. 8 years’ relevant & diverse experience in complex organisational-systemic contexts incl.

o   Min. 4 years in senior role(s) successfully leading data-related functions and managing data-related teams

·       Experience of social impact initiatives, programs and/or organisations

·       Advantageous: fluency in one or more African languages

Specific (incl. technical) Knowledge & Understanding and/or Skills & Abilities

·        Comfort and confidence leading sophisticated work with data

·        People-and-user-centered approaches to data and information

·        Thoughtful familiarity with M&E/MEL/MERL approaches and practices

·        A track record of, and strong appetite for, seeing patterns and building coherence amid complexity

·       Advantageous: proficiency in/with

o   PowerBI and/or similar interactive data visualization software

o   Microsoft Dynamics 365 and/or similar CRM software

o   A/B testing

General Knowledge & Understanding and/or Skills & Abilities

Behaving & Learning

·       Behaving trustworthily: being reliable, accepting, open, congruent (ie. integrity)

·       Learning curiously, incl. learning how by doing differently

o   Clear curiosity (asking questions, questioning assumptions, doing differently, trying things)

o   Track record of learning

o   Openness to & appetite for feedback

·       Familiarity with and curiosity about

o   Societal scale

o   Systems doing-and-thinking

o   Design thinking & iterative designing

o   Driving to succeed

·       Commitment to SmartStart’s purpose and social justice internationally

·       Advantageous: experience in, or familiarity with, early learning, ECD, education, public health, etc

Relating & Adapting

·       Building trusting relationships

·       Playing role(s)-across-contexts adaptively

·       Creating the conditions for and facilitating people’s thinking diversely and doing good work together

·       Co-building & communicating coherence unending

·       Reprioritising continually

Developing Self

·       Acknowledging one’s own relative strengths (& weaknesses)

·       Seeing & navigating rhetoric vs reality

·       Navigating ambiguity

·       Coping with stress caused by the above

Developing Systems Doing-and-Thinking

Seeing, synthesizing, sense-making and influencing

·       the big picture / story, incl. emergent phenomena

·       the relations between wholes & parts

·       patterns across space and over time

·       feedback loops (circular causation)

·       boundaries and working across them appropriately

Sophisticated problem-solving, incl. distinguishing complicated from complex problems & contexts

·       scan & synthesize disparate sources of information

·       if complicated: sense-analyse-respond

·       if complex: probe-sense-respond