How to Unf*ck Your Organisation

Organisational strategy and architecture for n00bs

Published in

We Are Open Co-op

3 min readOct 6, 2022

“The purpose of an organisation is to enable common people to do uncommon things.” (Peter Drucker)

WAO works with complex, multinational clients as well as smaller groups containing just a handful of people. While every organisation is different, we’ve noticed things in common that we often have to help them untangle.

How to Unf*ck Your Organisation: organisational strategy and architecture for n00bs — CC BY WAO

We’ve put together an email-based course to help forward-thinking people in senior roles who might need a bit of help and orientation. We’ve broken things down into actionable steps based on the resources found at our Learn with WAO site, giving you enough direction and inspiration to get started transforming your organisation for the better!

👉 Sign up here 👈

Here’s what to expect

The course arrives in your inbox by email. The only signing up you have to do is right at the beginning, when you enter your email address and your first name. We’ll only use your data to keep you informed about this course, in accordance with our privacy policy.

0. Intro — explaining and introducing the course

1. Grokking your context — you can’t plan a route to where you’re going unless you know where you’re at!

2. Developing a mental model — developing your own metaphors to understand the change(s) you’re trying to make.

3. Prioritising all the things — figuring out what’s most important is a multi-faceted problem that requires facilitated thinking

4. Spotting potential problems — let’s remove blockers before they become a problem, and figure out how to deal with them if they do.

5. Rubber hits the road — putting it all together and running a retrospective

This is the first version of How to Unf*ck Your Organisation, which will improve with your feedback. So please feel free to hit ‘reply’ at any time and get a response by a real, live, human being!

👉 Sign up here 👈

How often will I receive emails?

We’ve put together a a range of email courses over the past couple of years, and others we run have varied email delivery frequencies. So we thought we’d ask on the different networks in whichwe’re active to find out what people prefer.

Here’s the results of our not-incredibly-scientific polling:

Chart showing responses to question “How often would you want to receive an email that goes through both theory and practice, and links to resources to help you implement change in your org?” — *We ran the poll in Slack using emoji voting, which means people can see others’ votes before they cast theirs — did that skew responses?* 🤔 (CC BY WAO)

As you can see from the above chart, although there’s some support for monthly, it’s weekly email deliveries that got the most votes. So that’s what we’re going to do!

👉 Sign up here 👈

How much does this cost?

The great thing about this course is not only is it free and links to free resources, but you can receive an awesome badge at the end of it. It’s literally full of win.

Badge showing stormtroopers in style of Keith Haring — If you think it looks like we typed in “stormtroopers in the style of Keith Haring” into an AI art generator and put the result into a wobbly circle, then you’d be absolutely correct (CC BY WAO)

While the course is free, it’s not cheap, so if you’d like to help support our efforts please make a one-off or recurring donation via Open Collective.