Imagine stepping into a room, where every puzzle you solve brings you closer to understanding the core values. These, in turn, are the key to understanding of ethics, integrity and accountability for sustainable development. How might an Escape Room do justice to this exercise and provide insights for Integrity Champions in the Public Service?

Our latest experiment was to design a learning experience to answer this question and also to serve as a guide to commemorate Global Ethics Day, 2024.  We did not want to design just any “escape room” but wanted to co-design a prototype that would resonate with the theme of the day, “Ethics Empowered” inviting participants to navigate ethical dilemmas and carefully crafted problems.  These challenges would help them better understand how an escape room would help people understand their roles as integrity champions using gamification, behavioural insights, futures thinking and digitalisation to achieve SDG 16.

It was incredibly rewarding to see all these elements come together at the Global Ethics Day event.  We were looking forward to commemorating something as vital as ethics in an innovative and memorable way.

For this event, one of our goals was to move beyond the long speeches, passive lecture style events and craft an experience that would fully engage participants on multiple levels. The Accelerator Lab has learnt through trial and error over the past five years, and have refined our approach to layer in elements of fun, reflection and real-world applicability.  We spent the entire day at a specially reserved venue selected by the Office of the Prime Minister. Ten teams embarked on a competitive journey through three uniquely themed rooms focused on ethics, technology, and problem-solving. Each room presented a different challenge that was to be completed within 45 minutes. To incentivise the process, teams had to collect tokens shaped like SDG 16 as they successfully navigated and completed all three puzzles and challenges, with the ultimate goal of being the first to gather all three tokens.

The first room, “The Ethics Word Factory” was a classic icebreaker designed to get everyone’s energy up. But as the participants progressed to tackling dilemmas and envisioning ethics and integrity in the future, we carefully structured each new challenge in the subsequent rooms to build on the last in complexity. Transparency and ethical decision-making are not simple, so we wanted the experience to mirror that. The second room, the “Integrity Quest” allowed teams to tackle 15 ethical dilemmas, which included minor offenses like spreading misinformation and serious crimes like electoral fraud. The third and final room, called the “Integrity Summit 2030” Room challenged teams to explore the importance of technologies like AI, blockchain, bitcoin, machine learning, and the Internet of Things for public servants in terms of service delivery.

Here's what I heard some participants saying about the different rooms in our Ethics Escape Room prototype:
For the "Ethics Word Factory" room, everyone seemed to really enjoy the mental workout of the crosswords and word searches. Memory said she appreciated how it helped seeing how concepts like “integrity”, the Public Service Charter” and “transparency” were used in a learning context and as a reminder of what the integrity champions ought to achieve in the public service.  

The "Integrity Quest" room generated some lively reactions. Kgalemang thoughtfully pointed out how sobering it was to grapple with real issues that could arise down the line in our work to ensure ethical and accountable service delivery. Meanwhile Thekla laughed that she learned something new about her coworkers through watching their debate strategies unfold! 

As for the Integrity Summit 2030 seeing the public service through a futures lens, Linea was in awe of the tech terminology but also struck by how timely the questions were. She looks forward to brainstorming further on how digitalisation might evolve as part of improving services to the citizens, while Paulus noted it was eye-opening to understand the role of digital and tech in integrity discussions.

Some participants wished they could use these activities back at their workplaces to tackle as a group. Overall, the feedback was that testing these different challenge types was an engaging way to learn interactively. We can't wait to keep developing the experience based on their insights! It’s always amazing to see how differently teams approach the same problems. Debriefing afterwards, we saw many gained new perspectives on challenges they hadn't considered. Providing these opportunities to learn from each other is so important.

Hearing about people’s takeaways on the future of public service struck a chord. If we can use interactive learning to help people envision unintended consequences before they happen, perhaps we can avoid some of them altogether. That’s the kind of impact that makes this work so worthwhile. Seeing another successful event that will no doubt lead to further growth renews my passion for learning experience design. I’m excited to keep raising the bar on interactive and experiential training experiences.

We invite you to test out our prototype and set up an “Escape Room” as part of learning about ethics and integrity.  
Please let us know how it went, and more importantly, how you used the exercises! The download links are below on the left.