Interim Head of Change (SC Cleared) in Bristol

Role: Interim Head of Change / Strategic Change Consultant

Location: Bristol (2 to 3 days per week on-site)

Clearance: Active SC Clearance

Broad description of role: To lead the design and delivery of the change strategy, translating the operating model into lived behaviours, mobilising stakeholders, and driving readiness, engagement, and cultural adoption at scale.

Specific responsibilities include:

• Sets and leads the overall change and engagement strategy: Defines the end-to-end change journey, engagement architecture, and narrative linking operating model.
• Designs and delivers structured stakeholder engagement across a complex system: Actively manages senior and specialist stakeholder groups (e.g. HRBPs, BCMs, culture leads), including resetting engagement approaches to ensure alignment, focus, and manageable input into core products.
• Leads Trade Union engagement and partnership approach for change: Designs and delivers TU engagement strategy, sessions, and materials (e.g. IWA / Mixed Economy Workforce), including shaping forward engagement plans and enabling co-creation on workforce change.
• Owns change readiness insight, assessment and reporting into senior governance: Co-develops and calibrates Change Impact Assessments (CIA) and readiness baselines for Defence Reform governance, providing an evidence-based view of organisational readiness and risk.
• Leads organisational effectiveness (OE) and culture change interventions at scale: Designs and delivers flagship interventions (Leader Labs, Basecamp, Future Fit) to embed behaviours, leadership expectations, and high-performance culture across the Group.
• Builds leadership capability to land the operating model: Develops and delivers leadership programmes and content that translate the mission, culture, and operating model into practical leadership behaviours and decisions.
• Establishes and mobilises change networks and ambassador capability: Creates and guides networks (e.g. change ambassadors, culture leads) to enable local ownership, consistent messaging, and scaled delivery of change activity.
• Develops core change artefacts and engagement products for the programme: Produces and iterates key materials including TU engagement packs, workforce transformation plans, structural implementation proposals, and OE delivery plans to drive structured implementation.
• Embeds data-driven culture and change measurement: Establishes cultural maturity frameworks, change readiness metrics, and feedback loops (surveys, focus groups, case studies) to track progress and refine interventions.
• Adapts delivery approach in response to system feedback and evolving context: Continuously refines engagement and OE delivery (e.g. piloting cohorts, tailoring interventions, sequencing activity) to manage uncertainty and maximise impact.
• Aligns change activity to programme dependencies and critical path: Integrates change delivery with programme milestones and dependencies, ensuring engagement and culture interventions land at the right time to enable implementation.
• Supports operating model embedding at team and squad level: Contributes to design and implementation of 'change journey' roles, governance, and guidance to ensure adoption, behavioural shift, and sustained benefit realisation locally.

Experience required: A senior level change leader with experience and expertise in managing the workforce impact of how change lands and is embedded. Particularly useful to have experience of system level change, operating model change, product operating models and technologically driven transformation.