People profiles
Irina Stoyanova
Founder of Cheeseball Consulting
Finding the right path by accident
Irina Stoyanova is an instructional designer and educator with higher education strategy and innovation experience, contributing learning design expertise across Synarchy routes. Education was never the original plan for her, but it quickly became a central focus. Years spent in higher education revealed a deep appreciation for the way people learn and grow. This lead Irina to branch out of her role in a higher education institution into breader instructional design, coaching and sustainability.
A grounded approach to instructional design
Irina’s work with instructional design is not about simply moving information from a textbook to a presentation. It is about developing the deeper frameworks that support how people actually absorb and use knowledge: engagement, accessibility, relevance, and cross-cultural understanding.
In educational and corporate contexts, that means helping institutions move beyond standard, one-size-fits-all teaching. Her work supports educators and teams in becoming more intentional, more responsive, and more capable of designing curricula that meet real-world needs. The result is often stronger student retention, healthier learning environments, and an educational culture in which people feel both challenged and supported.
This is also what shapes Irina’s consulting. She works with organisations that want to develop their training programmes with depth, clarity, and a stronger sense of purpose. Her approach is analytical and creative rather than formulaic, helping institutions better understand where their methods are falling short, where their students are getting stuck, and what a more effective way forward might look like.
Integrating sustainability and policy with care
Alongside her work in instructional design and consulting, Irina also focuses heavily on policy development and sustainability. This is a practical form of support for organisations moving through questions of environmental responsibility, ethical AI use, and long-term institutional planning. It is not just about writing rules; it is about creating frameworks that actually guide behaviour and decision making.
Her approach is rooted in structural change rather than superficial compliance. Irina accompanies institutions as they look more carefully at their own practices and make sense of how to integrate sustainability into the core of their teaching and operations. That makes this work especially valuable for organisations that have found that true sustainability requires more than just a new mission statement.
Irina’s practice is forward-looking and adaptable. It welcomes input from different disciplines, including those focused on technology, design, and business. Her work is especially attentive to the ways in which policy can either hinder or support real innovation, and she consistently advocates for structures that empower rather than restrict.
A practice shaped by diverse experience
Irina brings more than academic theory to this work. Her path has moved through IT recruitment, artisan community engagement, theatre foundation management, and later a long period of deep involvement in higher education policy, internationalisation, and curriculum rebuilding. Across those different environments, a consistent thread has been her attention to how people connect, how systems function, and the deeper questions that shape how we learn.
That diverse experience gives her work a particular quality. She understands both institutional demands and individual complexity. She knows what it means when a system asks more than its current structure can support. And she brings that awareness into her work with a combination of sharp problem solving, fast-paced innovation, and care.
Her background in event planning, coaching, and business development adds further depth to that foundation, as does her ongoing commitment to supporting neurodivergent individuals and lifelong learning initiatives. Together, these experiences inform a practice that is both strategically sharp and deeply human.
Irina within the Synarchy ecosystem
Within the wider Synarchy ecosystem, Irina brings a perspective centred on educational innovation, structural clarity, and sustainable growth. Her contribution strengthens projects and collaborations that do not only need creative ideas, but also a more thoughtful way of building the systems that will sustain those ideas.
That makes her especially relevant in work that sits at the intersection of learning, policy, organisational development, and meaningful transformation. She helps ensure that innovation does not become disconnected from practical application, and that collaboration remains rooted in attention to how people actually share and build knowledge.
Her presence within Synarchy adds an important dimension: not only strategic or operational contribution, but a way of working that keeps the learning experience in view.
What Irina’s work can open up
Irina’s work can stand on its own, but it also opens into wider development. It can support institutions that want to teach with greater impact, organisations that need a more grounded approach to training, and leaders looking for something more meaningful than standard corporate learning modules.
What she offers is both a practical framework and a deeper invitation: to design more carefully, structure more honestly, and make space for education that truly transforms.
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