Operations and Integration Lead

Location : Remote; North America or Europe-friendly time zones preferred
Position Type : Part-time to near-full-time, depending on candidate and scope
Compensation: Flexible depending on experience
Start Date: Flexible, ideally June 2026

About the Transformations Community

The Transformations Community is a global network of researchers, practitioners, facilitators, and changemakers exploring how societies, organizations, and communities navigate profound social, ecological, technological, and institutional change.

Through conferences, collaborative initiatives, communities of practice, and experimental inquiry spaces, TC supports transformative learning, relational practice, and collective experimentation across disciplines and sectors.

We are now entering an important 2026–2027 cycle leading toward our October 2027 conference in Santiago de Compostela, Spain. This will be both a major gathering and a public synthesis point for our work on transformative practice in unsettled times.

Why We’re Hiring

TC is small, distributed, creative, and increasingly complex. Much of our work moves through conversations, relationships, conferences, initiatives, communications, and informal follow-up.

We now need a stronger operating backbone.

We are looking for an Operations and Integration Lead — internally, an Organizational Integrator — who can help make TC’s work more visible, coordinated, remembered, and carried forward.

We need someone who can create clarity and follow-through while preserving TC’s lightweight, relational, inquiry-centered culture. This is not a conventional executive assistant role, a heavy project-management role, or a generic operations job.

The core challenge is simple:

Help TC become more reliable without making it heavier.

Your Role

You will work closely with TC’s Executive Director, conference lead, communications implementer, web/technical support, and inquiry collaborators to help the organization answer:

• What work is active?
• Who owns it?
• What is due?
• What is stuck?
• What has been decided?
• Who needs follow-up?
• What needs leadership input?
• What can move without waiting?

Your role is to build and steward a practical operating system that helps TC function with more clarity, continuity, and shared accountability.

Key Responsibilities

• Build and maintain a lightweight operating dashboard across conferences, inquiry initiatives, communications, operations, hiring, partnerships, and field relationships.
• Help clarify ownership, decision pathways, approval responsibilities, and escalation points across active workstreams. Track active workstreams, owners, deadlines, decisions, follow-ups, and dependencies.
• Help translate strategic priorities into visible workstreams, decisions, dependencies, and next actions.
• Help important meetings and conversations produce clear next steps.
• Work with the conference lead to make Santiago 2027 timelines, dependencies, communications needs, and decision points visible.

• Support clearer handoffs to communications and web/technical team members.
• Prepare decision points for the Executive Director by clarifying options, timing, trade-offs, and next steps.
• Maintain simple records of key relationships, commitments, and follow-ups.
• Use AI tools pragmatically for meeting summaries, task extraction, decision logging, document retrieval, and workflow support.
• Help create a weekly operating rhythm that keeps the team aligned without excessive reporting.
• Identify recurring coordination, communication, handoff, and visibility challenges and help develop lightweight solutions. 

First 90 Days

• In the first 1–2 weeks, you will conduct a rapid orientation scan, meet with key team members, identify active workstreams and bottlenecks, and create a first rough operating picture.
• By the end of the second week, you should have a first version of an operating dashboard in use.
• By 30 days, TC should have a working rhythm for tracking active work, owners, decisions, and follow-ups.
• By 60–90 days, the system should be more stable, conference dependencies should be clearer, and TC should be less dependent on informal memory and ad hoc coordination.
• The goal is not a perfect system. The goal is a system that people actually use.

You Bring

We are looking for someone with:

• 7–15+ years of relevant experience in operations, coordination, chief-of-staff, project/program operations, research center management, or mission-driven organizational support;
• strong follow-through and attention to commitments;
• ability to track multiple workstreams without losing the thread;
• experience supporting a founder, executive director, principal investigator, or small senior team;
• comfort working in ambiguity and creating order from incomplete information;
• skill building lightweight systems that people actually use;
• clear written communication;
• calm relational judgment;
• experience with distributed or remote teams;
• practical comfort with tools such as Google Workspace, Slack, project management platforms, shared dashboards, AI assistants, or lightweight automation tools;
• interest in sustainability, systems change, organizational learning, research-practice networks, or related fields.

You Are Probably Not

We are probably not looking for:

• a conventional executive assistant;
• a junior coordinator who needs highly defined tasks;
• a heavy project-management consultant;
• someone who wants to impose a large system before understanding the culture;
• a conference producer seeking to own the conference function;
• a communications strategist;
• a purely technical automation specialist;
• someone who mainly loves tools and dashboards for their own sake.

Work Environment

This is a remote, flexible role within a small and globally distributed team. The work is intellectually lively, mission-driven, relational, and evolving.

You will have significant autonomy, but you will also need to work closely with others, clarify handoffs, and help a creative organization become more coherent without becoming rigid.

What Success Looks Like

Success means that, after several months:

• active workstreams are visible;
• major decisions are logged;
• important meetings generate follow-up;
• conference dependencies are clearer;
• communications and web tasks have better upstream inputs;
• the team has a working operating rhythm;
• the Executive Director is less responsible for remembering every thread;
• and TC can see what is slipping before it becomes a problem.