SJ- - Making Better Decisions

Designing for Better Decisions: Creating an ESG Learning Experience at HBX Group

At HBX Group, ESG is not a standalone initiative, it is a core part of the company's long-term strategy and vision for the future of travel. The strategy, strongly championed by CEO Nicolas Huss, is built around a simple but ambitious goal: to contribute to making travel a force for good.

The ESG strategy itself is substantial, encompassing:

3 strategic pillars: Environment, Social, and Governance
10 commitments
10 strategic projects
75 actions
Alignment with the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)

As a global travel technology company, our decisions influence suppliers, partners, customers, and travelers across the world. The scale and complexity of the strategy meant that simply publishing information would not be enough. Employees needed to understand what the strategy meant, why it mattered, and how it connected to their daily work.

At the same time, we recognized that a strategy of this size would not be embedded through a single learning intervention.

A one-time eLearning course would never be enough to transform organizational behavior.

Instead, the learning experience needed to serve as a launch point, introducing the strategy, building awareness, and beginning the process of developing more sustainable decision-making habits across the organization.

Collaboration with ESG Leadership

An Agile Learning Design Approach

We used an iterative and agile approach throughout the project.

Rather than building a complete course upfront, we worked through multiple cycles of discovery, prototyping, stakeholder feedback, and refinement.

Some examples of our agile process included:

Discovery Workshops

Working with ESG stakeholders, we identified common misconceptions about sustainability and explored situations where employees could realistically influence outcomes through their decisions.

Rapid Scenario Prototyping

We created rough storyboards and conversation flows before investing in full development.

This allowed us to quickly test ideas with stakeholders and ensure the scenarios reflected authentic workplace situations.

Focusing on Measurable Behaviors

Because "sustainable behavior" is such a broad concept, we narrowed our focus to specific decisions that could potentially be observed or measured over time.

This helped us connect learning objectives to meaningful business outcomes.

Designing for Sustainable Decision-Making

The primary goal of the eLearning was to launch the ESG strategy and provide employees with a foundational understanding of its goals, commitments, and relevance to their roles.

However, we wanted to go beyond awareness.

We designed the experience to help learners practice decision-making in realistic workplace situations where sustainability considerations might influence their choices.

Using Articulate Storyline, Vyond animations, and AI-generated voiceovers, we created three scenario-based learning experiences.

Importantly, the scenarios were not designed around finding a single correct answer.

Instead, learners explored the intended and unintended consequences of different decisions and reflected on how those decisions aligned with ESG principles and organizational priorities.

Linking Learning to Real-World Behaviors

One design consideration was identifying situations where learning could potentially influence measurable workplace actions.

For example, one scenario focused on corporate travel booking decisions.

If two providers offered similar costs and business value, would employees recognize sustainability credentials as an additional factor worth considering?

By incorporating situations that mirrored actual workplace decisions, we created opportunities to connect learning with behaviors that could potentially be tracked through existing business systems.

Outcomes and Reflections

This project reinforced an important principle for me as a learning designer:

Large-scale organizational change does not happen through a single training course.

However, learning can play a critical role in launching a strategy, building shared understanding, creating common language, and helping employees begin practicing new ways of thinking.

By combining ESG expertise, business strategy, scenario-based learning, and agile design practices, we created an experience that supported the introduction of HBX Group's ESG strategy while encouraging employees to make more informed and sustainable decisions in their daily work.

Rather than positioning ESG as a compliance topic, the learning experience invited employees to see themselves as active contributors to a strategy designed to make travel a force for good.

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