Chief Inspiration Officer
Role Purpose
Coordinate Animal Think Tank’s core team’s capacity to build a network of local grassroots groups campaigning for Animal Freedom.
Who we are looking for
This role is about building a team that can deliver our organisational vision of a network of grassroots campaigning groups. Your key role will be to lead our core team to build a powerful, resilient and broad-based Social Movement. You will be committed to our mission, align with and model our values, and have the attributes required to coordinate a large, complex project.
We value humility, courage, effectiveness, building shared power, and love towards others. Our team is rewarding to work with, applies discipline, and has a strong work ethic. We don’t want action without strategy, aptitude without care, or passion without discipline. The animals need a high-calibre team, an ambitious strategy, a mass movement, and personal fortitude to see it through.
Leading towards Animal Freedom will require: a high degree of personal dedication; fearlessly confronting our adversaries; staying calm whilst others lose their cool; being on the frontline of protests; and a disciplined commitment to nonviolence.
Initial Objectives and Key Results
1. Lead the deliver of our Key Results.
Your primary objective will be to build Animal Think Tank’s potential to deliver on our organisational goals — developing and implementing best practice for social movement governance, culture, and local group development. This will require you to use leadership and coordination skills to juggle competing demands, facilitate cross-functioning teams, and prioritise tasks and resources to maintain focus on outcomes and mission. This will involve supporting other leads to develop and deliver their own teams’ goals. We use holacracy as an organising method of distributing management across the organisation, so we are looking for a servant leader.
2. Steward the launch of a Social Movement.
In 2023 we’ve begun the work of soft launching a network of local campaign groups within the UK. It is important that you align with our values in order to model, communicate, and embed them throughout the groups we build. We are looking specifically for someone with a non-egotistical, caring and composed personality. We plan to scale a network of local groups in 2024 and it’ll be up to you to make sure we’re ready!
3. Oversee implementing our key systems and agreements.
As a start-up organisation we are completing the design of our key processes, systems and agreements. You’ll use organisation-building skills to implement these as we move into an operational stage of development. In time, we expect to grow to approximately 25-30. Key will be ensuring that we distribute management of the work away from the centre to grant individuals the autonomy they need to be effective, and that all existing systems, processes, and organisational structures we’ve designed are fit for purpose and running effectively to enable us to grow robustly. Often you’ll need to plug the gaps, get your hands dirty, sometimes with menial detail, as we learn to distribute work.
It may sound daunting, but you will receive a lot of support from our Direction Leads and founders, particularly sharing responsibility for delivery in the first year.
How you’ll spend your time:
– Informing and steering key operational decisions and decision processes;
– Providing oversight over and ensuring the effectiveness and efficacy of our work;
– Prioritising the areas of work in the organisation that need attention;
– Balancing competing organisational demands and resources;
– Realigning delivery of operations when it deviates from plan and what’s needed;
– Providing support as a sounding board to team leads and prioritising their work;
– Providing sense-making and psychological support to individuals and teams.
You should take this role if:
– You wish to use your skills in a meaningful and challenging way;
– You’re excited by the idea of making a significant impact for animals;
– You enjoy empowering others;
– You enjoy working with other high calibre and disciplined colleagues.
You should not take this role if:
– you expect people to do what you say rather than to be a servant leader;
– your focus is on taking action yourself rather than building a team and movement that enables many to take action;
– you look for someone to blame when things go wrong;
– you get caught up in doing stuff, change your mind and lose sight of the horizon.
The following readings will help you succeed in this role:
– How Big Things Get Done – Bent Flyvbjerg
– Beyond Entrepreneurship 2.0 – Jim Collins
– The Team That Managed Itself – Christine Wodtke