Good IA work fails all the time, not because the structure was wrong, but because the people dynamics were ignored. This course gives you practical tools for identifying key stakeholders, understanding competing incentives, and navigating influence without burning bridges.

You’ll learn how to map power and interest, anticipate resistance, and build alignment so your work has a real chance of being implemented.

Stop creating diagrams that no one uses. This course teaches you how to build visual models that help teams think, decide, and act.

You’ll learn when to diagram, what kind of model to use for different problems, and how to design visuals that clarify complexity instead of adding to it. The focus is on making models that earn their keep, not just look impressive.

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Shared language is infrastructure. This course focuses on the practical work of creating and maintaining controlled vocabularies that support clarity, consistency, and trust across systems.

You’ll learn how to surface messy terminology, manage synonyms and conflicts, and guide teams toward shared language without getting stuck in semantic debates that go nowhere.

The metadata we create determines what people can find, connect, and understand across our systems. In this course, we'll move beyond theory and dig into the practical work of designing useful metadata. You'll learn how to audit existing attributes, create structured tagging systems, and implement governance approaches that keep your metadata clean and consistent over time. 

Taxonomy design lives in the tension between how people think and how systems need to work. This course walks through the real-world challenges of creating categories that help rather than hinder.

You’ll learn how to evaluate grouping logic, test labels, handle overlap, and design taxonomies that can evolve as content and organizations change.

Good ideas don’t move organizations, good arguments do. This course focuses on how to make clear, persuasive arguments for information architecture decisions.

You’ll learn common argument types used in IA work, where they tend to break down, and practical strategies for strengthening your case so others understand why change is necessary — not just what you’re proposing.

If you can’t explain the value of structural decisions, someone else will decide for you. This course teaches you how to connect information architecture work to real business outcomes.

You’ll learn how to reason about cost, risk, and impact, and how to make the case for investing in structure before problems become expensive failures.

IA work is rarely solo work, but collaboration doesn’t magically happen. This course gives you concrete frameworks for co-creating structures with cross-functional teams.

You’ll learn facilitation approaches, input-gathering techniques, and decision-making patterns that help groups move forward together, even when priorities, vocabularies, and incentives don’t naturally align.

Structural change fails when the human side is treated as an afterthought. This course focuses on how change actually shows up in IA work, through disrupted workflows, unclear expectations, and invisible losses that never make it into project plans.

You’ll learn how to diagnose what kind of change you’re really dealing with, recognize common failure patterns, and choose approaches that support people through transition without relying on burnout, heroics, or compliance theater.