The New Ways of Working Course is Back! 🎉
Navigating Collaboration, Complexity & Culture
After a year off to focus on other projects, the New Ways of Working course is returning in January 2025—and it’s better than ever! 😊
When I first launched the course in October 2020, I didn’t expect it to sell out 13 times and attract participants from organisations ranging from Accenture to the United Nations, Mercedes-Benz to Mencap, Xero to the UK Government, and The Co-op to Klarna. People have joined from across the UK, Europe, and the U.S., and the response has been incredible. Here’s what participants say:
World-Class: The course has an NPS score of 85 (over 80 is considered ‘world class’).
Trusted: 9.5 – “I would recommend the course to my colleagues.”
Practical: 9.0 – “I feel more comfortable experimenting with new ways of working in my team.”
I love delivering this course, and the 12-month break gave me time to work on some exciting upgrades. The course now aligns more closely with my ever-popular New Ways of Working Playbook, integrates my New Ways of Working Chatbot and I’ve added fresh insights on Culture and Complexity, alongside the core theme of Collaboration.
Purpose 🎯
The course objective is for you to enjoy your job more and to become an even better member of your team. Along the way, you’ll learn how to hold healthy meetings, and how to make better decisions, faster. You’ll learn techniques to help you become more comfortable giving feedback, identify what’s getting in the way of collaboration and culture, and understand the impact complexity has on ways of working.
To do this, we'll borrow from the best sources. These include agile, self-management, organisational psychology, complexity, and the most progressive companies on the planet.
Course overview 🧪
The course is led by me, Mark Eddleston. I’m a New Ways of Working expert and facilitator with a passion for collaboration, complexity, and culture. Since 2015, I’ve been practising New Ways of Working and synthesising the mountain of information that’s out there.
Throughout the course, you’ll be practising all the way. You'll get better at listening, teamwork, and affecting change. There will be pre-work ahead of each weekly live session on Butter (like Zoom/Teams but awesome). In between, you'll have the chance to ask questions on our Slack. You'll become familiar with various tools such as Notion, where course content is shared, and Focusmate, which will help you stay on track. You'll experience Mural and Liberating Structures, plus loads more of Mark’s favourite facilitation techniques.
Crucially, you'll be designing experiments and implementing them in your own team. You'll also form partnerships with fellow participants who will help you, hold you accountable, and be depending on you.
What we’ll work on 🚀
Week #1: Cultural Challenges – Identify what’s getting in the way and find areas ripe for experimentation within your team and context.
Week #2: Collaboration – Explore psychological safety, a culture of helpfulness, and what makes some teams perform better than others.
Week #3: Complexity – Work life becomes a little simpler when we embrace uncertainty and understand the nature of the system we are working with.
Week #4: Feedback – We’re all better off if we understand the impact we’re having on those around us.
Week #5: Decision-making – Top-down decision-making has a big impact on collaboration and culture, so we’ll be learning some alternatives.
Healthy meetings and experimentation are woven throughout the course, and you’ll be learning structures and practices that you can pop in your pocket, take back to work and use immediately.
What to expect 🔍
Expect a practical, interactive and participatory experience. Each week the format looks like this:
Pre-work: Before live sessions, you’ll complete course materials (articles, podcasts, and videos) shared via Notion. Time commitment: approx 2 hours.
Live session: We’ll discuss what stood out from your pre-work, dive deeper into the topic, and figure out how you’ll apply it at work. Time commitment: 2.5 hours.
Experiment: By the end of each live session you’ll have designed an experiment to try out at work that week. This takes place in your workday. Time commitment: this is your call.
Accountability partnership: Having committed to your experiment you’ll arrange a session with a course peer to refine your plan or reflect on how it went. Time commitment: 1 hour.
⌛ So it’s a weekly commitment of at least 6 hours.
When 🕒
The five-week course begins on Tuesday, 14 January 2025. We meet each week at 14:25 - 17:00 GMT, wrapping up on 11 February.
Eligibility ✅
This course is for you if you are:
Dissatisfied with traditional ways of working – you believe there’s a better way!
A member of a team – the course is not suitable for those who are not in a team.
Choosing to attend – and haven't been sent by your boss!
Open-minded – prepared to challenge and experiment at work.
Committed and ready for a challenge – this is an intensive course, and your hard work and active participation are key to its design.
Cost & Registration 🎟️
Individual (Solo): Full price – £1,750.
Pair (Two colleagues): Discounted – £1,500 each.
Trio (Three colleagues): Best Value – £1,250 each.
☝️ To secure your place, double-check the eligibility criteria, then send a note to mark.eddleston@marco.work, and I’ll generate an invoice right away.
*Please note that cohorts are limited to 12 places.
Testimonials 💬
The immersive nature of the course combined with a fast pace made it really engaging and massively increased what I took away. I loved that the best practice was built into how Mark ran the course each week, there are so many things I've copied for my own team meetings like check-ins, liberating structures and EasyRetro.
The idea of the experiments seemed really daunting at the start of the course, but I've completely changed my mind. It's a way of telling people upfront 'I don't know if this will work or not' and 'I need your feedback' which myself and the team have found really empowering. I also learnt a lot from the breadth of experience participants on the course, it was really fun getting to know everyone.
Mark's style is warm and reflective and I looked forward to these sessions all week. He is a great facilitator, super knowledgeable and has some brilliant facilitation tools that I enjoyed using/experiencing.
I loved the structure - having a different focus for each session and a range of materials to familiarise yourself with in advance meant the time spent together ‘live’ was fruitful
I really appreciated the welcoming atmosphere; any new social setting is challenging for me, but you did a great job of helping me to feel at ease, which made it easier for me to participate and learn - thank you! I also appreciated the range of learning materials provided. Finally, it was brilliant to see the things we learned about being put into action. I especially enjoyed the final session, because the practical example of decision making resonated with some of my own experiences, and opened my eyes to ways to do things better.
The diversity of the cohort, there were so many different perspectives that helped me think out side of the box. Also, the effort gone into the perpetration of materials, and the format of Notion was SO EASY to follow - really great!
I appreciated the de-mystification of New Ways of Working - in my org, the language can sound a bit foreign, but this course translated it into ways I intuitively understand and introduced structures to make them function properly. It makes NWOW feel... dare I day... safe to try.
