Serious Gaming

A serious game is an effective way to help people learn about collaboration, strategy and other complex topics. It also helps them move strategy from understanding into practice, and turn it into concrete value for the organisation.

Serious games do this through strategic dialogue. They help organisations talk with each other about dilemmas: choices around strategy, identity, ethics or collaboration. Instead of strategy being decided and rolled out from above, participants are actively involved in exploring and applying it.

And that’s exactly where value emerges. Strategy only takes on meaning when people understand what it means in practice, for their choices, their behaviour and their daily work. By having the conversation about that translation, you take the step from abstract direction to concrete value creation.

A good example is Ixplora. The game puts participants in a situation where they have to make decisions themselves. They are challenged to use the tools and frameworks the organisation has already developed. If they don’t, they notice straight away that they can’t reach a good answer.

That’s exactly the power. You don’t tell people what the strategy is. You let them experience how to apply it, and why that matters.

That’s why serious games are mainly used for complex, strategic or sensitive questions. Questions where knowledge alone isn’t enough, and where you need shared understanding, better choices and ultimately more value for the organisation.

At its core, serious gaming is all about the experience. The game itself is just the vehicle. Rather than transferring information, participants become part of a situation where they make their own choices, work together and feel the consequences of their actions straight away. It’s that experience that makes insights stick.

This way of learning ties closely to Kolb’s learning cycle, which sees learning as a continuous process of experiencing, reflecting, conceptualising and experimenting. Serious games step right into the middle of that cycle. They offer a concrete experience that invites reflection and delivers insights you can apply straight away.

At the same time, serious gaming fits within the wider development of learning, where we move from passive receiving to active discovery. Traditional formats often stay stuck on broadcasting or limited interaction. With serious games, the weight sits on experience. The participant stops being a spectator. They become active, shaping the learning process themselves.

Serious games rarely stand on their own. In practice, they are often part of a wider learning programme made up of training, workshops and interventions.

What we consistently see is that the game is often the part that opens people up the most. Participants describe it as concrete, relevant and energising. The reason isn’t that it’s “fun”. It’s that the game actively involves them in the issue. They have to make choices, work together and reflect on what happens. That’s how insights land faster and deeper.

“I had never realised how (not) acting on these core values could affect the overall performance of an organisation. My eyes were really opened.”

At the same time, the real value goes beyond what happens with the individual. Behaviour emerges and lives within a wider context of team dynamics, culture and organisational design. That’s why we look at what a participant learns, and equally at how those insights fit within the bigger picture.

This experiential way of learning makes serious gaming useful for a wide range of questions. It’s especially powerful for topics that seem ‘dry’ or abstract at first glance, or that are strongly situational by nature. Think strategy questions, collaboration, leadership or organisational development. Themes where nuance matters and where there’s rarely one right answer. By making these questions something you can experience, you make them concrete and open to discussion.

That also makes serious gaming a powerful tool for strategic dialogue. Rather than strategy being explained or imposed, participants are invited to make their own choices within a realistic context. This opens the conversation: about dilemmas, about values, and about what certain choices actually mean in practice.

The result goes beyond more understanding. It creates a shared conversation and shared ownership. Even so, serious gaming isn’t the right solution for everything. For passing on technical, theoretical or exact knowledge, other learning formats may work better.
When the complexity of a specific organisation is the subject, a simple game is often not enough to capture the many possible outcomes and interactions.

In those cases, a simulation makes more sense. Simulations are a specific form within serious gaming, where a real system is modelled as accurately as possible. They are aimed at working through scenarios within a concrete organisational context, often with clear KPIs and well-defined cause-and-effect relationships. Think of questions like: what happens if we turn this dial? Or: how do certain choices affect our performance?

Serious games don’t need to copy reality one-to-one. Precisely because they are less rigid, they make room for creativity, different perspectives and broader audiences. And that’s exactly where their strength lies. They aren’t there to find the one right answer. They’re there to explore possibilities and understand choices.

A serious game has a direct influence on how individuals think, react and act. But lasting behaviour change doesn’t happen in isolation. From the perspective of the InContext culture model, for example, we know that real change only happens when you influence the individual and also look at the wider context and existing patterns within a team or organisation.

That’s why we never use serious games as a standalone intervention. They’re always part of a wider learning or change journey.

To make the impact concrete, we work with a before-and-after measurement involving the people around the participant, such as colleagues or direct reports. They are the ones who notice in daily practice whether behaviour actually shifts. By testing against specific behavioural indicators beforehand and afterwards, we get insight into the development that’s taking place.

The power of this approach is that we go beyond what someone thinks they have learned themselves. We measure what visibly changes in the daily work. That makes the impact tangible and relevant for the organisation.

At the same time, behaviour change remains a process. The game sets something in motion: awareness, insight and intention. The real anchoring happens in what comes next: application in practice, reflection and follow-up within the team.

The serious games are based on a combination of insights from learning and behavioural psychology, complemented with theories on organisational culture and change.

One important source of inspiration is the work of Erin Meyer, published among others in Harvard Business Review. Her work emphasises that organisational culture and behaviour don’t change simply by explaining them. They shift when you bring underlying dilemmas and differences in perspective out into the open and explore them together. It’s those conversations, often complex and sometimes uncomfortable, that create movement.

Serious games tie into this directly. They name these dilemmas and make them something you can experience. Participants are placed in situations where they have to make choices, weigh up different interests and see the consequences of their actions straight away.

On top of that, the games are strongly based on the principles of experiential learning, as described in Kolb’s learning cycle. By offering participants a concrete experience, followed by reflection and translation into practice, a learning process emerges that goes far deeper than traditional knowledge transfer.

What makes this approach extra powerful is that all of it takes place in a controlled environment. That means you can magnify and examine complex or sensitive questions, without the direct consequences of the real world. This creates room to experiment, gain new insights and explore different behaviour.

The combination of dialogue, experience and a safe setting makes serious games an effective tool for actually getting behaviour and culture into motion.

The translation into practice, often called ‘transfer’, is one of the biggest challenges in learning. In traditional training, there’s often a gap there. You hear a good story, but applying it on the job turns out to be hard.

With serious games it works differently, because the transfer actually starts during the intervention itself. Participants do more than sit and listen. They are constantly in conversation, making decisions and reflecting on what happens. They experience situations that closely resemble their own work context, and they often translate those insights straight into their own practice.

That effect grows stronger because we tailor the games as closely as possible to the participants’ reality. The closer the experience sits to their daily work, the easier it becomes to actually apply new behaviour.

At the same time, a game is never the only factor. Whether behaviour really changes depends in the end on what happens next in practice. If the environment, think of processes, management or culture, doesn’t move along with it, you often see people fall back into old behaviour.

That’s why we always make serious games part of a wider whole. They set something in motion: insight, awareness and intention. But the real anchoring lies in how it connects to daily practice.

So there’s a natural limit to what you can change with one intervention. If you want small, incremental improvements, a game alone can have plenty of impact. When you’re asking people for fundamentally different behaviour, the context has to shift with them.
That combination is where lasting impact really comes from.

In practice, serious games are actually one of the most scalable forms of learning.

Because many of our games are run digitally, they can be scaled up relatively easily to larger and international groups. At the same time, we believe learning only really has impact when people actively take part, work together and get into conversation. That’s why our games are always built around interaction, including in a digital setting.

An important part of that scalability sits in how we develop our games. We work with platforms where the game mechanics are separated from the content. That means the core of the game stays the same, while we can adapt the content to the context: a different market, culture or audience.

That allows us to use the same game for different teams worldwide, while keeping the content relevant. Think of adjusting cases, dilemmas or language, so it feels familiar to participants in their own work environment.

It’s that combination, digital scalability and content flexibility, that makes it possible to offer a consistent yet relevant learning experience even within large, diverse organisations.

Yes, continuously.

We evaluate our games together with clients and participants, and we mainly look at one question: does the right experience and the right conversation emerge? Does the game lead to the insights and discussions we have in mind?

At the core, our designs are solid. The game mechanics have been developed and tested over the years, so in most cases they don’t fundamentally change anymore.

Where continuous development does take place is in the content. We keep adjusting it based on new insights, feedback and changing contexts within organisations. Think of sharpening dilemmas, updating situations or bringing them closer to the daily reality of the target audience.

That’s how the game stays relevant and effective. The point isn’t to build something completely new each time. It’s to make targeted improvements where they really create impact.

We hear that question regularly, and it actually makes a lot of sense. For some people, the word “game” still carries associations with something light-hearted or non-committal.

What we see in practice, though, is that this image disappears very quickly as soon as people start taking part. The moment they’re in the situation, having to make choices and facing the consequences, it becomes immediately clear that this isn’t really about playing a game. It’s about the substance and the conversation around it.

In fact, the game format actually helps open up topics that are sometimes harder to discuss in a traditional setting. Because people step out of their daily context for a moment, room emerges to look more honestly at behaviour, collaboration and decision-making.

Our experience is that the “playful” character doesn’t distract from the content. It actually adds depth to the conversation. The form is light, the content is serious, and that combination is what makes it effective.

That partly depends on the form we use, whether it’s an existing game, a custom platform or a more extensive simulation. But the general process does follow a clear line.

We always start by truly understanding the question behind the question. What’s going on in the organisation? Which behaviour or way of working together do you want to influence? In what context does this all happen? That analysis is essential, because the game only has impact when it genuinely fits the daily practice of the participants.

Based on that, we either choose the right existing form or develop a custom solution. For a new platform or a bespoke game, we first build an initial version, which we then test in a pilot phase with a real target audience.

The pilot matters. We check whether the game works technically. More importantly, we check whether it sparks the right conversation and the experience we’re aiming for.

After the pilot, the programme is often rolled out more widely within the organisation. The game then becomes part of a larger learning or change journey, rather than a standalone intervention.

Finally, it doesn’t stop at one moment of use. We evaluate together with the organisation, gather feedback and keep improving the game so it stays relevant and continues to fit changing contexts and questions.

The result is a continuous learning tool that moves with the organisation, instead of a one-off training.

With serious games, value for money sits in the combination of impact, scalability and, above all, what happens after the game. A single isolated session won’t get you there.

First, there’s the impact per participant. A well-designed serious game creates an experience in a short time that would normally take much longer to build up in real practice. That means insights and behavioural awareness emerge quickly, certainly compared to more traditional learning formats.

Scalability also plays a role. Because games are often built digitally and modularly, they can be rolled out relatively easily to larger or international groups, without costs rising proportionally.

The reusability of the platform also adds to the value. The game mechanics stay stable at the core, while the content can be adapted or further developed for different contexts and audiences. That means you don’t have to build a complete new intervention each time.

But the most important factor in value for money is the follow-up. The game itself sets something in motion, insight, awareness and conversation. The real value only emerges when that gets translated into daily practice. Without follow-up and integration into the organisational context, the effect often fades away again.

That’s why we see a serious game as the starting point of a wider learning or change journey, rather than the end point. The combination of experience and follow-up is what ultimately determines the return on investment.