Transforming leadership culture through a high-impact hackathon
This culture-focused hackathon helped leaders translate the new leadership model into actionable behaviors, resulting in an immediate mindset shift and measurable engagement lift.
The Dublin Airport Authority (daa) had an ambitious goal: to become an airport industry leader, with 4,000+ employees and operations on four continents. To activate the executive team’s vision, we introduced a new leadership model that required rapid adoption from all managers. A culture-focused hackathon helped leaders translate the model into actionable behaviors, resulting in an immediate mindset shift and measurable engagement lift.
Building momentum with an experiential learning hackathon
A fast-paced, two-day “culture hackathon” used a design-thinking approach, plus behavioral science and peer-driven problem-solving to shift mindsets and drive adoption at scale.
Leaders wanted to understand team members’ perspectives and quickly developed prototypes to fix real cultural challenges.
Scaling leadership development
The experience jump-started behavior adoption and provided a blueprint for sustained culture transformation. The program sparked rapid mindset and behavior shifts, evident in early engagement data and leader feedback.
Initial outcomes from the hackathon shaped the next phase of leadership development: expanding to more leaders to accelerate adoption, resulting in further increased engagement.
Brainstormed why engagement was important to their employees
Pitched ideas and aligned on final approach to engage teams and activate their vision
Developed a set of “big behaviors” necessary for consistent culture transformation across regions and roles
80+
leaders aligned on the new leadership behaviors
10%
increase in leadership survey scores within 6 weeks
2
additional hackathons included 210 more leaders after the initial success