The CEO’s question to us
We are the market leader in providing insurance services, direct to customers or via our broker network. Digitalisation is enabling new types of players to enter our market and they are starting to challenge our position. Our senior leadership is not moving fast enough with ideas and action; I want to open up their minds to what can be new ways of driving our growth in the future.
Background
Although a market leader, with a history of 150 years of providing insurance services, the company has little top of mind awareness amongst customers. In markets like the UK, as customers are moving to do more of their shopping online, insurance comparison websites are becoming a fast-growing channel and are largely commoditising insurance. In such a context, there is a risk of new and more digitally savvy players eroding the market position and the company being forced to play, what could become a never-ending game of catch up.
How to stand out from the crowd and differentiate in an increasingly crowded, noisy, digitally enabled market space?
The challenge as we saw it
- How to open the minds of senior leadership to the need of moving from being a market leader to a brand leader?
- How to open up the minds of senior leadership to new possibilities and finding new answers to critical growth questions?
- How to identify new possibilities for growth not clouded by the past patterns and know measures of success?
- How to mobilise commitment and energy for more agile ways of developing and testing new value propositions?
What we did
- In the lead-up to the annual Executive Days with the Top 100, we set up an OUTside-INspiration approach aimed at generating new ideas for profitable growth and developing one of the company’s (aspirational) core values of open mindedness.
- We conducted an intensive growth scan together with marketing and HR, using customer insights, employee insights, and gathered via interviews and questionnaires, growth related views from across the company. Through this, with the Executive Board, we identified 10 key growth themes around which outside inspiration was needed (such as: customer centered innovation, overcoming business model disruption, finding a new identity as a company, brand visibility to end customers without bypassing distribution channels).
- For each growth theme, we identified a relevant peer company outside of their industry and prepared with them to share their experience with the Top 100, in an inspiring, storytelling format. In parallel, we trained a group of internal facilitators to prepare to lead a business safari during the Executive Days, where smaller groups of executives would meet with a counterpart in another company to be inspired and engage in a dialogue. The learning from this dialogue was captured and transposed to concrete growth actions to be taken across the strategic, structural & behavioural disciplines by the Top 100 and the Executive Committee.
What the client got out of it
- Concrete & tangible ideas for profitable growth inspired by external examples & practices.
- A company-wide story telling approach to share inspiration and to transpose learning from it to the business.
- A learning and strategising approach led by their own people; in the following year the same trainers did an internal business safari to showcase the best practices in different parts of the business. This has grown into an on-going company-wide scanning practice gathering insights and transposing them into new business ideas.
- Practical & joint experience of showing open-mindedness behaviour by all leaders in the Top 100 as a building block for future leadership behaviour.
- Increased level of awareness & understanding of the need to work in an integrated, parallel ways in order to realise sustainable growth.