Senior Director of Field Innovation

With 75 years of experience, our focus is on helping the most vulnerable children overcome poverty and experience fullness of life. We help children of all backgrounds, even in the most dangerous places, inspired by our Christian faith.

Come join our 33,000+ staff working in nearly 100 countries and share the joy of transforming vulnerable children’s life stories!

Key Responsibilities:

Job Purpose

Our Promise calls us to “Stewardship that results in a bias for action, Continuous Improvement and Innovation towards future challenges.” The Senior Director of Field Innovation will provide leadership to the Strategic Topic: Field Innovation: Discover, Scale, Harvest and into the area of Continuous Improvement, promoting and equipping staff across the Partnership with the tools and understanding to systematically improve how they and their teams organise and implement their work.

KEY RESPONSIBILITIES

Provide leadership to promote innovation across the organisation and demonstrate focused commitment to field / child-centred innovation in alignment with Our Promise by designing and testing a process to bring promising ideas to scale:

• Refining the framework for field / child-centred innovation including definition, principles and approach, ensuring field empowerment.
• Leverage existing processes to evaluate and scale a simple innovation approach, with a clear pathway and resources to identify, fund and scale field/child-centred innovation.

Provide strategic leadership and thought leadership in the area of Continuous Improvement within World Vision, including the integration of Continuous Improvement and Innovation for mutual reinforcement.  

Supervise and support the Field Innovation and Continuous Improvement Advisor to:  

• Engage with Field Offices, Support Offices and Global Centre, working with leaders, teams and individual contributors to provide mentoring, guidance, coaching, consulting and training for Continuous Improvement.
• Manage, improve and expand day-to-day services linked to certification programmes including White Belt, Yellow Belt, Green Belt and Black Belt programmes. 
• Create and develop reporting systems to measure and track the progress and effectiveness of Continuous Improvement efforts and progress on development of Continuous Improvement capacities across the Partnership.
• Manage, sustain, improve and expand the Continuous Improvement knowledge infrastructure available through multiple channels such as team sites, eCampus training content, wvcentral, etc., to ensure optimal use of the tools, content, training courses, etc. across the partnership.
• Project manage programmes designed to foster a culture of Continuous Improvement, increase awareness, and help individuals and leaders develop and strengthen organisational core competencies for staff and leaders, e.g., agile organisation, and improve and innovate.   

Maintain up to date knowledge of the internal and external environment and current best practice in the fields of innovation and Continuous Improvement for self and others in the team.

Build knowledge management, learning and communication of ideas and results, for internal and external audiences, including an innovation registry (of good practices from the field) tagged by context, need or sector that the field can easily access and learn from each other.

Provide guidelines on how an innovation becomes a best practice or gets mainstreamed into a project approach, model or standard.

Required Knowledge & Qualifications

• At least 10 years senior experience in field-facing ministry (field office and/or regional office), ideally including both development and humanitarian response settings.
• Track record of involvement in innovation, preferably in a leading role.
• Track record of successful implementation of Continuous Improvement.
• Bachelor’s degree in Development, Business Administration, Engineering, Quality, or related subject. 
• Certified Lean Six Sigma Black Belt or Master Black Belt.
• Working from home the norm. Travel domestically and internationally up to 33% of time.  
• Fluent spoken and written English.

Preferred Knowledge and Qualifications

• Master's or higher degree in a relevant subject.
• Formal training in leading innovation.
• Understanding of: Organisational Development; Change Management; Knowledge Management
• Spanish, French or other language(s) in use in WV are an advantage.

Applicant Types Accepted: