Values written on a wall change nothing. Values people can name in a difficult moment change everything.
Following a major regulatory failure, one of our banking clients needed more than a values refresh. It needed to understand the cultural and systemic conditions that had allowed good people to make, enable or overlook harmful decisions, and to translate that understanding into behaviours over 250,000 colleagues across more than 40 countries could actually live. We diagnosed the system first, then activated the change top down, middle out and bottom up together, and built the symbols, systems and wrap-around communications to make the new culture visible and repeated rather than announced once and forgotten.
For a global aviation client, the challenge was different but the root was the same. Their existing values were not universally known or adopted, and the CEO wanted a more human, unified culture to match global growth. Our discovery surfaced one message consistently across every region: "Treat me like a human being, not a machine." We used that as the test for every new value we helped them define: does it reflect real employee experience, and can it survive contact with an operational shift under pressure. The values had to hold up in a busy airport at 6am, not just in a boardroom.
Who this is for
- Organisations embedding new values, or admitting the current ones exist on paper only
- Leaders who inherited stated values that do not match what employees actually experience
- Businesses that need a values change to hold up globally without losing local relevance
How it works
- Discovery. We listen across the system through interviews, focus groups and diagnostic mapping to find the gap between the stated culture and the lived one.
- Definition. We translate what we hear into values grounded in both strategic ambition and employee reality, not aspiration alone.
- Translation into habits. Every value becomes a small number of memorable, repeatable behaviours people can apply in an actual decision, conversation or moment of pressure.
- Activation. We run large-scale experiential workshops where people explore their own role in creating the culture, not just hear about it.
- Embedding. Structured sessions after the initial launch let people share what they tried, reflect on what happened, and commit to what comes next, turning a launch event into an ongoing practice.
What is included
- Global culture and values discovery, through executive interviews, employee focus groups and diagnostic mapping
- Translation of abstract values into practical, repeatable behavioural habits
- Large-scale experiential activation workshops, in person, virtual or hybrid
- Structured embedding sessions after launch, so the habits keep being practised and shared
- Recommendations for embedding values into recruitment, onboarding, performance management and recognition, so the change is reinforced by the systems around it, not just a single campaign
For the banking client, the behavioural change work was embedded into leadership performance, rewards, development and everyday organisational processes, reaching more than 250,000 colleagues across 40 or more countries and 8 or more languages.
For the aviation client, the programme reached approximately 50,000 employees across 34 countries and produced an eight percentage point increase in global employee engagement following activation, with one client leader reporting employee approval rates of over 93 percent.
"The values and culture embedding was a huge success. Everyone is talking about this and we have seen approval rates of over 93% from our employees."
Client leader, aviation case study
Culture is not what leadership writes down. It is what happens the next time someone is under pressure and nobody senior is watching. That is the only place values are ever actually tested.
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