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 is a global team that conceptualizes, designs, facilitates, and delivers management training to MSF's supervisors around the world. WoW programs are highly contextualized to reflect our working environments, reinforce MSF's discussion-based approach to management, and promote the practice of building cultures of learning in our teams.

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

Squads and Pods

The WoW Team is comprised of Squads and Pods.

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

Pods are ad hoc working groups made up of team members from any of the Squads — and from outside the WoW Team when needed — to focus on transversal projects.

WoW Squads

WoW Squads are where the day-to-day work and magic happens.

Squads are the natural working groups that make up the WoW Learning Center. Each squad is responsible for ensuring their specific piece of the WoW program is successfully 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 Setting the vision for WoW programs and guiding the team's direction, ensuring alignment across squads and supporting strategic decision-making.

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

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

Program Management Scaling and delivering WoW programs, ensuring both onsite and virtual trainings run seamlessly. Coordinates with host sites, manages materials and logistics, and project manages each cohort from enrollment to graduation.

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

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

WoW Pods

WoW Pods are where problems are solved and ideas turn into action.

Pods are designed around a clear purpose and intended to be dynamic, creating space for ownership, creativity, and momentum. They are where different perspectives come together and decisions are made where the work happens. Pod membership is fluid — people move in and out based on needs, priorities, and where they can have the most impact.

Here are some of the pods that came together during our work:

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. Delivered in both Level 1 and senior-level trainings, with a focus on alignment, consistency for facilitators, and real-world application.

WoW 1 Refresh

Reimagined the Level 1 training developed and "locked down" in 2022. 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 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 are 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 believe that to deliver world-class training, we had to first live out the very principles we share with our participants. For the WoW Team, these were not just abstract concepts; they were the behaviors that defined our own ways of working.

Our work was guided by three foundational commitments:

Inclusive Perspectives

We ensured the voices of all team members were heard, actively seeking out differing ideas to ensure our collective wisdom was baked into 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 growth is a lifelong commitment. We encouraged every team member to take responsibility for their own professional development and 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 our commitment to minimizing effort and maximizing shared impact, 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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