People and Leadership
Gate One partnered with Boehringer Ingelheim to deliver a scalable and immersive programme linking behaviours to patient outcomes, embedding faster, collaborative and innovation-driven mindsets across 54,000 global employees.
Boehringer Ingelheim was embarking on an ambitious growth strategy to expand its therapeutic pipeline. Alongside new processes and increased investment, the Board recognised that success would depend on a shift in mindset, encouraging faster decision-making, stronger collaboration, greater openness to innovation and a sharper focus on performance. The challenge was how to bring that shift to life across a global organisation of 54,000 people working across research, clinical development, manufacturing and commercial roles, each with very different day-to-day realities.
Gate One was asked to create something that would land with people in a meaningful way. This was not about explaining a new set of behaviours, but about helping individuals to see what those behaviours meant in practice, and why they mattered. The ambition was to create a consistent global experience that still felt relevant locally, allowing people to interpret the change in the context of their own role.
We designed and delivered a fully immersive virtual reality experience, something not previously attempted at this scale within Boehringer Ingelheim. Delivering it required overcoming several challenges. It was a creative challenge in designing an experience that could genuinely shift behaviour, rather than simply communicate it. It was also a logistical challenge, requiring the global distribution of VR headsets so that employees worldwide could take part. In parallel, it was a leadership challenge, asking senior stakeholders to support a bold and untested idea and commit to bringing it to life.
At the centre of the experience was the story of Sarah, a patient undergoing cancer treatment. Participants stepped into her home and saw how her condition affected her quality of life, grounding the experience in something real and human. They were then taken through key moments across the value chain, experiencing the decisions required to bring treatments to market. In these moments, they saw how behaviours such as collaboration, pace and accountability directly influenced outcomes, helping them connect their everyday actions to the difference made for patients like Sarah.
More than 100 employees contributed to shaping the experience, ensuring it reflected real scenarios and pressures. This made it credible and relevant, enabling individuals to relate it directly to their own work.
The response has been strong. Initial feedback showed a 90% satisfaction score, with 93% agreeing that VR was a powerful tool and 89% saying they felt inspired to apply the behaviours in their work. Follow-up surveys confirmed that impact was sustained, with 97% of participants recalling the experience weeks later and 85% maintaining a strong sense of urgency to act.
Sarah has since become a shared reference point across the organisation, used to ground discussions and guide decisions. What started as a bold idea has helped create a more consistent way of thinking about behaviours and their impact, reinforcing the link between day-to-day actions and improving patients’ lives across a complex global organisation.
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