Who we are
Wynoodle is both a community and a consultancy. It functions as a container to awaken people and institutions to their potential and to reclaim for themselves an internal locus of control and a personal source of agency. We journey with them as resources as they begin to actualize that potential, unlocking their ability to further image their own potential and the potential of the systems that they want to make a meaningful contribution towards.
How we work
It’s maybe easier to explain how we don’t work: We don’t offer solutions. We don’t give feedback. We don’t give advice. We don’t have pre-canned trainings modules for you to watch. We’re not going to sell you on the latest “best practice” that will magically solve all your problems.
Instead, we believe that you are the greatest source for how you should and could be in the world. Our role is to ask questions to help you better discover that. We use mental frameworks to help us order and organize our thinking. These frameworks aren’t models, so they won’t give you any answers. Rather, they become a source of questions to help you develop your own answers, answers specific to the concrete situations that you care about.
Yes, along the way, we’ll teach some skills that you can apply to novel situations in the future. But those skills are always acquired in the context of working on something that’s meaningful to you right now.
What might that look like?
Well, it could look like a lot of things.
If you’re looking for personal or professional development, it could be a series of 1:1 meetings between the two of us. If you’re part of an organization that’s stuck and unable to make progress, it could be me coming to work with you and your organization to upgrade your thinking so you can unstick yourselves. If you’re a student, it could be me tutoring you in something I have enough expertise in to be a competent guide (mathematics, physics, computer science, writing). If you’re an educator, it could be me designing a professional development workshop that’s specific to issues you and your colleagues are facing. I’m pretty flexible on the nature of our relationship. It can be short-term or an ongoing collaboration, depending on the specifics of your situation.
Meet the Founder
Ash Morgan
Wynoodle was born from my desire to make a meaningful contribution to education systems. When I was a student at USC, I made a promise to myself that I would find a way to work in education. I didn’t want to start my career working in education, however. So, I pursued more financially lucrative majors in Computer Engineering and Mathematics.
I spent the next 22 years working as software engineer and manager on PowerPoint, with two detours: one to ship Picture Manager (for the 2003 release) and one for the rewrite of the shared Office Graphics stack (for the 2007 release). During my time at Microsoft, I or my team was responsible for the foundational core of PowerPoint that runs across all its platforms along with the collaboration stack that allows multi-user editing and real-time co-authoring. I was also one of the architects who designed the new XML-based file formats for PowerPoint and shared Office Graphics that became IS 29500. As part of the work on Office Graphics I designed the file format for all the built-in shape geometries used across Office applications. (Incidentally, this means I can create new shapes, too.)
I retired from Microsoft in 2020 right before COVID-19 lockdowns swept across the country. Since then, after navigating pandemic life, I’ve been decompressing from my two decades in Big Tech. This 4-ish year hiatus (can’t really start counting until 2021 at the earliest) allowed me to reconnect with some old hobbies (woodworking, crocheting, reading) and start a new one—writing.
Writing has been…weird? fascinating? rewarding? frustrating? challenging? Yes, all of those (and more!) I publish that writing over on my Substack newsletter: Entelechy. If you want to get a sense of how we might work together, reading through a few of the posts should help. In any case, writing has been my main means of navigating this career pivot of sorts. Since I have no formal training in education, these essays form a portfolio of work that introduces me to prospective clients.
Alongside my professional career, I’ve had a side gig teaching martial arts. I began my martial journey studying Shodokan aikido at USC in 1994 and continued to train and teach after moving to the SF Bay Area to work for Microsoft. I currently hold a 5th degree black belt awarded by the Shodokan Aikido Federation in Osaka, Japan. In 2010, I started training in Shindo Yoshin Ryu, a koryu jujutsu. After receiving my shoden teaching license in 2016, I’ve been the dojo-cho of the Yamakage dojo, where I teach and continue to train towards my chuden teaching license. All told, I’ve been on the mat training for over 30 years, and I’m still actively teaching 5 classes every week.
I mention this because navigating and managing conflict is not something most of us do particularly well. We see conflict as something to be avoided if possible or suppressed quickly if it can’t. Sadly, the first is magical thinking (conflict is inherent to human relationships) and the second rots relationships. We can do conflict better, where everyone walks away with their needs met, but it requires a different mindset than we might normally bring. So, if conflict confidence is an area where you struggle, expect some of this expertise to find its way into our conversations!