The learning challenge was to explore and answer the question: How might we embed experimentation and behavioural insights within Namibia’s public service by leveraging an existing network: the Ethics and Integrity Champions  as multipliers of innovation practice, not only for compliance but for learning-driven policy reform?  The challenge addressed the gap between policy aspiration (values-based governance) and behavioural implementation (daily ethical decision-making). The hypothesis was that UNDP Accelerator Lab methodologies such as experimentation, sensemaking, and portfolio learning  could be (exapted) repurposed and scaled through unconventional governance networks to shift organizational culture and strengthen integrity systems within the public service.Unusual Entry Points Work: Ethics, often viewed as static or moralistic, became a dynamic portal into learning about systems, incentives, and behaviour. Key learnings were as follows: Experimentation as Trust Building: The act of co-designing ethical experiments built trust between UNDP and government actors, validating innovation as safe-to-fail learning. From Individuals to Systems: Champions evolved from personal exemplars of integrity to nodes of systemic learning, connecting ministries through shared experiments. Bridging Policy and Practice: Embedding behavioural and sensemaking approaches within the policy apparatus transforms compliance frameworks into adaptive learning systems. Unusual Entry Points Work: Ethics, often viewed as static or moralistic, became a dynamic portal into learning about systems, incentives, and behaviour. Experimentation as Trust Building: The act of co-designing ethical experiments built trust between UNDP and government actors, validating innovation as safe-to-fail learning. From Individuals to Systems: Champions evolved from personal exemplars of integrity to nodes of systemic learning, connecting ministries through shared experiments. Bridging Policy and Practice: Embedding behavioural and sensemaking approaches within the policy apparatus transforms compliance frameworks into adaptive learning systems.

Scaling through Existing Systems: The Ethics and Integrity Champions became a natural diffusion channel for experimentation, a form of “Trojan Mice” spreading learning across ministries. Behavioural Insights for Governance: Introduced a measurable, evidence-based approach to improving ethical conduct by shifting from awareness to practice. Institutional Learning: Helped position the Office of the Prime Minister and the Ethics Division as learning partners within the governance ecosystem, not just regulators. Policy Influence: Demonstrated that innovation is a governance enabler;  influencing the inclusion of behavioural science, data ethics, and design-led experimentation in ongoing public service transformation plans.

Unlocking Ethics and Integrity: The Global Ethics Day Escape Room | United Nations Development Programme

Ethics training often dies in PowerPoint slides where everyone nods, no one changes. Gamification flips that. It turns learning into an immersive experience where participants must act, decide, and feel the consequences of ethical dilemmas. In this case, the Escape Room Challenge did more than entertain. It created a psychological mirror. When people are placed in time-pressured, team-based situations, their natural instincts emerge: collaboration, self-interest, hesitation, moral courage. Those patterns reveal not just knowledge gaps, but cultural codes. I chose gamification because it makes learning visceral. It enables civil servants to experience the tension between principle and pragmatism and to discuss it safely, without judgment. The method also: Makes ethical reflection enjoyable rather than punitive; Translates abstract policies (like “integrity” or “transparency”) into testable, observable behaviour; Builds camaraderie and shared purpose among colleagues which may be seen as a social glue for reform. If gamification reveals behaviour, behavioural insights reshape it. Public institutions are full of good intentions blocked by cognitive biases, habits, and incentives that make ethical action harder than it should be. Behavioural science acknowledges that people rarely act like rational agents. We are emotional, social, and context-bound. I chose behavioural insights because they: Allow small, evidence-based adjustments (“nudges”) that shift behaviour without coercion; Replace moralizing with empathy for how people actually make choices under pressure; generate measurable data by turning integrity from a moral concept into a behavioural science. For instance, I tested how public commitments, visual prompts, or collective pledges could reinforce transparency norms. These micro-interventions, while subtle, help normalize ethical conduct at scale. Gamification and behavioural insights work best together because they bridge feeling and evidence. One engages the heart; the other disciplines the mind. Gamification builds awareness and emotional insight. Behavioural science designs structural reinforcements to sustain that insight. By combining them, I moved from telling people to do the right thing to designing environments where doing the right thing is easier, rewarding, and visible. This choice also aligned perfectly with the Accelerator Lab ethos:  testing, learning, iterating, and scaling through human-centred experimentation. We didn’t just teach ethics; we prototyped integrity as a system. I chose gamification because people learn through play, revealing truth through simulation. I chose behavioural insights because systems change through design and realigns incentives with values. Together, they turned ethics from a compliance exercise into a living, adaptive learning process.

The interplay of innovation methods, new forms of data, and unusual partners fundamentally changed how we learned about integrity in the public sector, and what we learned. It allowed us to surface behavioural patterns, emotional truths, and systemic blind spots that traditional compliance approaches could never reveal. 1. Innovation Methods: Making the Invisible Visible By introducing gamification, sensemaking, and behavioural insights, the Lab shifted ethics from a moral lecture to an experimental process. In the Escape Room Challenge, for instance, participants had to collaborate, compete, and make ethical choices under pressure. This method generated live data  not survey answers, but behavioural evidence  about how public servants negotiate fairness, trust, and responsibility when facing dilemmas. Through sensemaking, we turned individual anecdotes into collective intelligence. Patterns of misunderstanding, power dynamics, and institutional pressures became visible once people were invited to interpret data together. We learned that integrity lapses were often not moral failures but design failures misaligned incentives, unclear processes, and a lack of psychological safety. 2. New Forms of Data: Beyond Compliance Metrics Traditional monitoring relies on audits, incident reports, or disciplinary records — data that tells us when integrity fails, but never why. Our approach captured qualitative and behavioural data: observations from games, decision logs, emotional reflections, and even body language during dilemmas. This created a new category of “soft data”: data about mindset and motivation. By blending this with existing administrative data, we produced a more nuanced integrity map: what triggers ethical blind spots, which incentives build trust, and how learning spaces can strengthen moral courage. This data was not just for reporting but a mirror for institutional learning. 3. Unusual Partners: Co-Learning Across Boundaries The most powerful insights emerged because the partnership itself was unconventional. The Head of Ethics and Integrity, the OPM, and UNDP Accelerator Lab co-designed experiments together, but we also brought in artists, psychologists, behavioural scientists, and youth facilitators to create learning experiences. These partners blurred the lines between sectors, where governance met game design, behavioural science met civil service training, psychology met policy. That fusion created psychological safety for experimentation in government spaces, something rare and precious. Public servants who might normally resist innovation instead became collaborators in discovery. 4. The Insight That Changed Everything Without this interplay, we would have continued to treat ethics as a checklist. Through it, we discovered that integrity is an ecosystem, not a personality trait. It can be nurtured through feedback loops, shared learning, and context-sensitive design. Innovation methods provided the theatre; data gave the script; and unusual partners helped interpret the play. Together, they revealed that ethical governance is not taught. It is practiced, sensed, and iterated. In essence, this approach transformed the Ethics and Integrity programme from an accountability mechanism into a living laboratory of trust.  A model for how UNDP can bridge innovation and governance to generate insights that policy alone could never reach.