Values in Action

Using Behaviour Insights and Gamification in Change Management

Embedding lived values for employees across one of Ireland’s Leading Banks. Not through policy, but by treating values activation as a behaviour change problem (not a branding one).

Behavioural strategy

Evidence-based research

Game design

Choice architecture

Co-design facilitation

Focus groups

Impact measurement

Value, decision-making & engagement

AI and design

Enhancing the user experience

Financial services Behaviour change Gamification 7-week delivery

10,000+

Professionals reached Worldwide

The Opportunity

Employees weren’t rejecting the values. The environment was.

Most of the employees actually agreed with the organisation’s values. The issue wasn’t their attitude towards them, it was context. High workloads, competing priorities, and time pressure meant the default way of working was misaligned with those values, not because people didn’t care, but because the environment made values-led decisions harder to reach. The institution had values — articulated, designed, and communicated. What they lacked was operationalisation: a mechanism by which 10,000 staff could meaningfully encounter those values in context. The brief was explicit: do not produce a communications campaign.

Organisational values are almost universally communicated and almost universally ignored. The gap is behavioural, not informational.

How do you design to embed values?

✓ THE REAL GAP

Employees were operating in environments where the path of least resistance ran counter to the values. Under pressure, people default to what’s fastest and most urgent, not what the values inscribed. The values existed, but had no practical role in how decisions got made day to day.

✓ THE SHIFT NEEDED

Help employees see that the values are not an abstract ideal, they are a navigation tool for exactly the moments that decisions feel hardest. The goal was to make values-led decision-making feel accessible and instinctive, not burdensome, even under pressure.

From Boardroom to Game Room

In 4 Phases

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01 Focus Group Discovery

Structured sessions amongst employees from across the organisation. Different seniority levels and departments, surfacing where values broke down under pressure, and why the environment made them hard to act on. A total of 90 people were involved in small focus groups. With direct experiential data from employees in the organisation, we were able to collect rich qualitative data on daily functioning, values perceptions and where the questions lie.

Key Principle: Behavioural discovery — research instruments that don’t account for human decision making and sit outside behavioural psychology often miss nuances of people (why they behave and how to motivate them).

02 (Co)Design

Collected evidence was converted into actionable findings. The concept brief of a creative, insights-driven, and highly engaging change management piece was discussed in several sessions with behavioural psychologists, designers, and leadership at the organisation. Inspiration from popular media grounded in psychological insights was the direction chosen to maximise impact, ‘memability’ and collective discussion.

Scenarios, characters, and dilemmas were built directly from the insights that emerged in the focus groups, ensuring every player recognised their real world inside the game.

Key Principle: Qualitative Analysis & Developing engagement — Designing for user experience through research insights

03 Prototype & Playtest

Early versions and prototypes were discussed, and 8 versions were produced.

These were pilot-tested with employee groups. Language, tone, and decision difficulty were refined through iterative feedback loops before full deployment.

Key Principle: Situated ambiguity — values tested in conditions mirroring real working scenarios.

04 Global Deployment & Impact

Rolled out to 10,000+ staff, integrated into existing team meetings and structures. Post-scenario prompts turned individual choices into conscious values conversations, because behaviour change requires reflection, not just exposure. Real-time tracking of completion, appreciation, and qualitative feedback produced a board-ready impact report for the organisation.

Key Principle: Organisation-wide autonomous deployment — removing the facilitation bottleneck that limits most value programmes to senior cohorts only. Facilitation is built in to ensure scale and seamless embedding.

Have a look in

The final deliverable was a branching scenario game, played in teams, without a facilitator. A complete digital gaming environment, complete with stakes, options, characters, environments, points and much more!

The team is dropped into a situation where two of their values pull against each other — where being decisive costs you seeking excellence, or where speaking up about a colleague costs you creating connections. There is no correct answer signposted. They choose, the story branches, and the consequence of that choice plays out. Then it asks them why.

There are various scenarios- one decision may change the story, and there were multiple endings. No choice was sitting independently. Each choice affected how the story moves. These were extracted verbatim from discovery sessions with AIB staff describing where the values actually broke down in their own week.

The design is fast, for intuitive judgement — the system that governs most real workplace decisions. The reflection prompt then forces slow, deliberate reasoning about what just happened. Values get tested in the conditions where they’re genuinely contested, rather than restated in conditions where nobody disagrees.

*Awaiting impact evaluation*

A New Phase

Phase 2 broadens the scenario engine to incorporate additional values across the bank, supporting richer interaction, more engagement and decision-processing models
The engine extends into onboarding, allowing new joiners to experience organisational values from day one and internalise them before default habits are established
Scalability is already embedded as a core design principle, ensuring the methodology can be applied across different sectors and business functions
The scenario engine is designed to be reusable, enabling new value sets, organisations, and contexts to be integrated without requiring changes to the underlying architecture