RAC Insurance
Stronger Foundations
The Challenge
The Royal Automobile Club of Western Australia (RAC) is a motoring club and mutual organisation, offering motoring services and advice, insurance, travel services, finance, driver training and exclusive benefits for their members. RAC has been around for more than 110 years, covers the largest geographical area of any automotive club in the world and is 100% local.
RAC engaged Integral Development to design and deliver a Strategic Business Simulation for its RAC Insurance group, part of RAC since 1947. The session was targeted at executive, senior and aspirant leaders, with all of RACI’s leaders taking part in the simulation. Its main goals were to help RACI team gain awareness of their critical organisational capabilities as well as to build and drive awareness of the need to be Innovative, Agile and Member Centric in its approach to change.
We agreed to utilise one of our biannual strategic development days to run a business simulation. We engaged Travis and the team at Integral Development to help us design the simulation around our specific needs, as well as ensure the context was a good fit for our current business strategy.
Alisa Hocking – Talent & Capability Lead, RAC WA
The Solution
To ensure the simulation met RACI’s core needs and sparked ideas and outcomes, Integral Development worked closely with Executives to design a highly contextualised simulation. This simulation drew on extensive research into the insurance industry, RACI financials and reporting, as well as emerging technology and global trends.
The simulation delivered to RACI group involved running highly complex parallel simulations in which two separate teams were engaged in Red Forces challenges, facing off as real competitors leveraging real industry data. Red Forces involve acting as a competitor to foster strategic optioning in terms of how they see you (e.g. as the enemy). It allows you to think about what competition might do in response to a given action, which in turn allows you to adapt or out manoeuvre them. The simulated ‘rounds’ involved well detailed, data driven scenarios which were probable and likely to happen. This realness ensured participants bought into the simulation and were challenged.
The group exercises were designed and structured to ensure the aspirations and outcomes of RACI were achieved. Three Integral Development facilitators ran the groups and two external actors were added to layer the complexity and ‘realness’ of the simulations, acting as stakeholders. The Executive Team acted as the board in the scenario, challenging teams and their strategic decisions. Participants were encouraged to use a strategic mindset, get outside their comfort zone, work together, learn how to do things differently and discuss about what the business needs in the future. Key themes of agility, innovation and member centricity were reinforced throughout the day and also debriefed at the end of the simulation.
The Result
The session achieved its main goal of driving awareness of the need for RACI to build an agile innovation culture as well as responding effectively to change by keeping its members at the centre of business operations and ideas. A number of real innovation and customer centred opportunities came out of the session and have gone back into the organisation to be further progressed. RACI is also reviewing its current internal standards to ensure the behaviours remain embedded beyond the simulation day.
The end result was a really useful session in which participants were challenged to respond to realistic strategic problems, as well as gain exposure to what our critical capabilities really looked like in a business context. Feedback from the session was very positive and we now believe we have some strong foundations to work from as we look to accelerate our capability building and talent development programs.
Alisa Hocking – Talent & Capability Lead, RAC WA
