Helping Anglicare Victoria understand its strategic environment
Together for good – the client challenge
Anglicare Victoria (AV) is one of Victoria’s largest providers of out-of-home-care and services for vulnerable children and families, as well as supporting adults, children and families with needs relating to parenting, gambling, educational engagement, family violence or life crises.
Support for vulnerable children and families is at the core of AV’s mission. Each year, AV works with more than 16,000 families who require support to care for their children, seeking to stabilise and build the capability of the family and prevent children from entering or remaining in the child protection system.
As a leading provider of these services, AV has a strong culture of innovation, and was named one of the Australian Financial Review’s Top 100 of Australia’s Most Innovative Companies – one of only six not-for-profit organisations on the list.
As part of AV’s ongoing commitment to innovative thinking and practice, Cube was engaged to undertake a strategic scan of the organisation’s external environment and identify opportunties to strengthen the design and delivery of sector-shaping services for disadvantaged Victorians – when, where and how they are most needed.
Bringing the right thinking and people to the table
Cube launched a sophisticated scan of AV’s external environment, reviewing and synthesising a large volume of research, thinking, and insights from AV’s spheres of influence and interest.
We used the PESTLEE framework to structure our efforts, and ensure a balanced consideration of external drivers:
Our interrogation of this body of knowledge included sector and service benchmarking from other Australian jurisdictions and internationally, and a ‘deep dive’ into Victoria’s policy and funding settings.
We designed a series of nimble, high-energy workshops with AV’s Board and internal leadership team to test our findings throughout the process, and constantly re-calibrate our scanning in areas of greatest relevance.
We also identified and enaged with a carefully selected cohort of ‘critical friends’ to capture incisive thinking about the future of the children youth and families sector and AV’s unique role and opportunities in it.
Our research culimated in a comprehensive environment scanning report for AV that included a series of evidence-led recommendations for AV to seize sector and service system opportunities.
The positive change we delivered
Our research provided AV with a window into the future of the sector, helping to shape a next generation of exciting organisational strategy and service innovation. It distilled and focussed leaders’ attention on trends that really matter for the organisation, and challenged assumptions and prompted new thinking by AV’s leaders on how to ensure the organisation will thrive in their next phase of growth, opportunity and reform.
Insights for inquisitive minds
Exploring the contours of a large-scale service system is a balancing act; structure with agility, depth with breadth, local with international, prevention and early intervention with response.
Complex ecosystems have many actors. Identifying critical friends from within an organisation’s sphere of influence is a key step to unlock highly relevant insights and strengthen key relationships
Scenario planning isn’t an exact science. As hypotheses are identified they need to be assessed on a plausible > possible > probable scale to drive a proportionate organisational response.
“Working with an innovative organisation gives us permission to think big and be bold. We’re excited to have helped AV to continue to bring their very best to disadvantaged and margianalised Victorians”
Tom Craven
Director, Cube Group
