Context & Origins

The WoW Team

Who we are, how we collaborated, and the story behind our WoW Portfolio

The WoW Team

The Ways of Working (WoW) Learning Center was a global team that conceptualized, designed, facilitated, delivered, and evaluated management training to MSF's supervisors around the world. WoW programs were highly contextualized to reflect participants' working environments, reinforce MSF's discussion-based approach to management, and promote the practice of building cultures of learning in MSF teams.

The WoW team operated with a commitment to creating accessible, engaging, and transformative learning experiences that met the diverse needs of MSF staff across all regions and operational contexts.

Squads and Pods

The WoW team was comprised of Squads and Pods.

Squads were a standing group of team members who focused on a specific aspect of the learning development lifecycle.

Pods were ad-hoc working groups, made up of team members from any of the Squads and outside the WoW team, who came together temporarily to collaborate on transversal projects.

WoW Squads

WoW Squads did the day-to-day work and made the magic happen.

Squads were the natural working groups that made up the WoW Learning Center. Each squad was responsible for ensuring their assigned tasks in the WoW programs were implemented, maintained, and improved.

Hover over a Squad to see more about their work.

🧭

Strategy &
Direction

🎨

Instructional Design & Technology

🤝

Learning Collaborations

🧰

Program Management

👥

Facilitation
Support

📊

Monitoring & Evaluation

Strategy & Direction Set the vision for WoW programs and guided the team's direction, ensuring alignment across squads and supporting strategic decision-making.

Instructional Design & Technology Designed innovative, beautiful, and engaging learning experiences, leveraging both pedagogy and technology to support meaningful learning.

Learning Collaborations Developed specialized programs that extended WoW topics and themes, collaborating across teams to address emerging needs and opportunities.

Program Management Scaled and delivered WoW programs, ensuring both onsite and virtual trainings ran seamlessly. Coordinated with host sites and managed materials and logistics for each cohort from enrollment to graduation.

Facilitation Support Ensured high-quality and consistent delivery of WoW programs by preparing and supporting facilitators and technical producers for onsite and virtual delivery.

Monitoring & Evaluation Collected and analyzed data to measure the impact of WoW programs, identifying insights, and highlighting opportunities to strengthen outcomes.

WoW Pods

WoW Pods solved problems and turned ideas into action.

Pods were designed around a clear purpose and intended to be dynamic. They created the space for ownership, creativity, and momentum, where different perspectives could come together, debate and make decisions. Pod membership was fluid with team members moving in and out based on needs, priorities, and who could have the most impact.

Some of the topics Pods explored during our time together include:

Scroll to see Pod details

AI Pod

Explored how the WoW team could maximize the benefits of AI while remaining mindful of its environmental footprint. Curated and shared resources, tested use cases, and helped build practical understanding across the team.

Decision-Making Module

Redesigned the WoW case study module to incorporate tools and practices from across all modules. The module was delivered in multiple programs to ensure alignment and consistency in real-world application.

WoW 1 Refresh

Reimagined and updated the Level 1 training originally piloted in 2020. Integrated lessons learned from other programs developed between 2022–2025, maximized the use of technology, and strengthened learner engagement and facilitator materials to create a more impactful learning experience.

WoW Annual Report

Defined the approach, theme, and content to communicate the impact of WoW across the MSF movement each year.

Delivery Improvement

Reviewed delivery processes to better prepare learners for virtual sessions and ensure projects were ready to host onsite trainings, improving overall experience and effectiveness.

The WoW Portfolio Backstory

The WoW Portfolio exists because of how we worked, not just what we built. We believed that to deliver world-class training, we had to role model the very principles we shared with our participants. For the WoW team, these were not abstract concepts, they were the behaviors that defined our own ways of working.

Our work was guided by three foundational commitments:

Inclusive Perspectives

We made certain the voices of all team members were heard, actively seeking differing ideas to ensure our collective wisdom was baked into all WoW programs.

Subsidiarity in Action

By creating psychological safety, we ensured decisions were openly deliberated and made at the levels where they would be implemented, fostering true collective ownership.

A Culture of Continuous Learning

We recognized that expertise and professional growth are lifelong commitments. We encouraged all team members to take responsibility for their own professional development and to turn every challenge and success into shared lessons.

As the team prepared to hand over the program for global scaling, we realized that our commitment to these principles had left us each in an interesting position: there was not one single piece of this program that did not include the perspectives of the wider team.

In the spirit of celebrating our shared commitment, this portfolio was created as a collective resource. It serves as a shared archive that each team member can use to tell their own story of the role they played in making the WoW a reality.

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