Strategist at IQbusiness

Job Description

• We are looking for experienced, senior individuals who are comfortable engaging with executive-level clients, understand their challenges, and apply strategic frameworks, capabilities, and techniques to explore challenges and position solutions. This includes facilitating engagements with executive teams as well as their leadership and operational teams to come up with meaningful solutions, obtaining and evaluating existing and potential strategies, challenging thinking, and ultimately reporting back / playing back meaningful recommendations to guide executives and executive teams.

Key Responsibilities and Output Areas Include:

Executive Stakeholder Management

• Engage confidently with senior stakeholders, and their assistants, to secure time with executives.
• Present effectively to senior teams and large audiences with clarity and presence.
• Generate project scope, charters, and sponsor communications to amplify project success.

 Strategic Collateral Review & Interpretation

• Source, review, and interpret strategic collateral (financial statements, strategy docs, press/analyst content, etc.).
• Identify insights, trends, strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats.
• Enrich insights by leveraging case studies, research, and additional relevant sources.

 Proposal Development & Presentation

• Translate insights into compelling proposal narratives aligned to client strategy.
• Develop high-impact presentation material (visuals, SCQA summaries, POV slides) that resonate with executives.
• Collaborate with EI and Midnight capability leads to shape differentiated positioning and value propositions.

 Research

• Conduct targeted research across industry, competitor, and technology domains.
• Apply structured frameworks (SCQA, SWOT, H3, etc.) to synthesise findings into actionable insights.
• Leverage GenAI and research accelerators to expand scope and depth of analysis.

 Facilitation

• Design and run workshops (strategy sprints, design thinking, innovation labs) that unlock collective intelligence.
• Use facilitation techniques to move executives and teams from exploration to decision.
• Generate tangible artefacts (journey maps, prioritisation canvases, playbacks) that feed directly into delivery.

 Evaluation

• Assess current-state capabilities, operating models, and customer/employee experiences.
• Benchmark maturity against peers and market disruptors.
• Translate evaluation findings into clear insights that inform recommendations.

 Recommendation Preparation

• Shape recommendations into concise, actionable roadmaps with clear trade-offs.
• Align proposed actions with client goals, capabilities, and risk appetite.
• Package recommendations so executives can easily socialise them internally.

 Strategic Playbacks & Review

• Lead structured playback sessions to test hypotheses and align sponsors on direction.
• Present insights and proposals in executive-friendly formats (SCQA, one-pagers, storytelling).
• Rapidly incorporate feedback to demonstrate agility and responsiveness.

Requirements

Education & Experience

• Matric (Bachelor’s degree preferred).
• 8+ years Management Consulting or equivalent strategic advisory experience.

Frameworks & Methodologies

• Strong application of one or more strategic frameworks (SCQA, SCR, SWOT, +DELTA, 3H Futures, Minto Pyramid, PESTLE, TOGAF, SRE).
• Proven capability in at least one methodology (Strategy Consulting, Service Design, Digital Transformation, Agile Strategy, Target Operating Model, Solution Architecture, DesignOps, CoE Leadership).

 Industry & Sector Knowledge

• Exposure to at least one major sector: Financial Services, Telco, Mining, Manufacturing, FMCG, Technology, Healthcare, EduTech, FinTech, AgriTech, etc.

Professional Accreditation

Affiliation or certification in one or more of the following:

• Customer Experience / Service Design
• Design Thinking
• Digital Transformation
• Artificial Intelligence
• Agility / Business Agility