The science
This isn't a personality test or a values poster. The method draws on decision science, behavioural economics and motivation research — and it's documented in published research you can read in full.
With nothing to comply with, people slow down and reason for themselves rather than reaching for the obvious response.
Shaping how a decision gets made produces more genuine outcomes than telling people what the decision should be.
Teams that define their own standards own them in a way that teams handed someone else's standards never do.
The dominant model of culture change says: change what people believe, and behaviour will follow. In practice it runs the other way.
Decades of behavioural science make the point plainly — our internal states are weak predictors of what we actually do. Tell people what the culture should be, ask them to rate how aligned they feel, and you change exactly one thing: the language they use to describe what they already do. That's the aspiration gap — the daylight between the values an organisation states and the behaviours it actually rewards.
Change what people do — and what they've agreed, out loud, to do for one another — and belief follows the behaviour. Behaviour-first, not values-first. That single inversion changes what an intervention is for. The job is no longer to diagnose the culture and prescribe a fix. It's to create the conditions in which a team defines, in its own words, the behaviours it needs — and commits to them.
Norton, Mochon and Ariely found that when people build something themselves — even badly, even flat-pack furniture — they value it far beyond what it's objectively worth. They called it the IKEA effect: labour leads to love. Run that in a room and it compounds — a team that has built its own culture map commits to it in a way that no team handed someone else's diagnosis ever will. People tolerate decisions made by others. They commit to what they help create.
Across more than fifty organisations and two thousand participants, one pattern repeats. Given a precise behavioural vocabulary and no script, groups move through three phases without being led. They envision — naming the behaviours they need. They diagnose — naming the gap between that and what they live. And they design — deciding what to change. Nobody sequences it for them. It emerges.
Read the research
Working papers, whitepapers and the guides that ship with the deck. Free — we just ask for your name and email so we can tell you when new research lands.
Whitepaper · a behaviour-first methodology for organisational culture change. McGregor, 2025.
Working paper · a frequency-based behavioural taxonomy for culture dialogue. McGregor, 2025.
How to run a session, step by step.
Executive briefing · why measurement was never going to move behaviour — and what does.
The reference volume for the deck: an entry for every one of the 80 behaviours, and the science underneath the method.
It's the difference between holding a card and understanding it. Each behaviour gets a plain-language definition, the themes underneath it, and — the part that matters in a session — what happens when it becomes normal. Both what it gives a team, and what it costs them.
It ships with every deck, and is issued to certified facilitators as part of the programme. We don't publish it, for the same reason we only show eight cards here: the deck does its work when a team meets the behaviours for the first time, in the room.
For each of the 80 behaviours
Plus the model, the research base, and the facilitation principles behind the method.