Culture by Design

Redesigning How Your Organization Works, Learns, and Thrives

Most organizations inherit culture by accident. At Stanford’s Peace Innovation Lab, we help leaders design culture intentionally — using behavior design, game design thinking, innovation frameworks, and peace-positive metrics to make culture a daily practice rather than a slogan.

Our Culture by Design pathway starts with a one-day executive intensive at Stanford, where leadership teams immerse themselves in the fundamentals of behavior design, game design thinking, and cultural operating systems. Many teams return for multiple sessions to deepen their practice — and then invite us to deliver tailored workshops on-site for employees across regions.

For organizations ready to go further, we offer enterprise rollouts and year-long partnerships, embedding new behaviors, rituals, and measurement systems until culture becomes an asset that drives collaboration, innovation, and resilience at every level.

What You’ll Learn

  • Behavior Design Fundamentals: How motivation, ability, and prompts shape every workplace behavior

  • Game Design Thinking: How to apply the Core Engagement Loop and MDAO (Motivation, Ability, Data, Outcomes) to create lasting cultural practices that people want to repeat and improve over time (see more at gdt.stanford.edu)

  • Innovation Habits: Habit-stacking techniques that make experimentation and prototyping routine

  • Cultural Operating Systems: Frameworks for measuring and evolving trust, cooperation, and inclusion across teams and geographies

  • Peace Innovation Lens: How designing for positive engagement between different groups leads to resilience, creativity, and profitability

Formats

  • Executive Intensive: A one-day, Stanford-based program for senior leadership teams. Experience core frameworks, hands-on exercises, and leave with a culture change blueprint ready to implement.

  • Enterprise Rollout: Multi-phase workshops delivered across sites and regions to embed new cultural practices at scale.

  • Year-long Partnership: Culture by Design embedded in your organization, with coaching, metrics, and applied projects that align culture with strategy.

Case in Point

A leading European financial services group partnered with us as they faced fintech disruption, cultural integration across multiple countries, and the need to embed ESG into daily business.

Through Culture by Design, they:

  • Accelerated time to market by 20–60%

  • Reduced development costs by 15–25%

  • Strengthened cross-regional collaboration and trust

  • Transformed responsible innovation from a compliance exercise into a source of competitive advantage

Why It Works

Culture isn’t words on a wall — it’s what people actually do. By combining behavior design with game design thinkingframeworks like the Core Engagement Loop and MDAO, we help organizations move from aspiration to practice. These tools make it possible to design culture as a system of repeatable, measurable behaviors that people actually want to do.

The result is not just culture change, but culture you can measure, sustain, and continually improve.

👉 Ready to design your culture?
Contact us to explore how Culture by Design can transform your organization.