I opened by teaching the design process and Bain’s 30 Elements of Consumer Value: types of value that run from saving someone time to making them feel something to changing how they see themself. No one in my lab was going to fixate on reducing friction without considering more meaningful ways to make life better.

I drew a customer value map that laid out the end-to-end customer journey of a claim, from preconceptions about vehicle damage and insurance all the way through life after the vehicle is fixed or replaced. I split it into three zones covering what the customer sees and what happens behind the scenes. I kept it high level on purpose: a reminder of the goal and a push toward bigger thinking.

Then I split participants into groups, putting competitors side by side and sprinkling in American Family team members who knew my approach, and ran an ideation session that rotated each group through every zone. With the whole customer journey in front of them, nobody could stay parked in the one section they felt they owned, and nobody could settle for a tiny improvement inside it. The question changed from "What does Tractable have? What does American Family have?" to "What do we all have, as an industry, that could reimagine this whole customer experience?"

The next day, I taught additive brainstorming, pushing participants to challenge current-state assumptions and reimagine further.

As a group, we narrowed only at the highest level: a discussion of “ah-ha moments” and a quick dot vote on the opportunities my facilitators and I had gathered. The real narrowing happened behind the scenes. Between sessions, my team and I made the calls: four design principles, two opportunity areas, four problem statements, and a set of ideas worth developing. The group came back to clear choices and ideas to work from. One problem statement asked them how they could treat “both our partners and our competitors as valued allies.”

Formal names matter less than words that carry the meaning. Most people heard “idea” and pictured a finished solution. I started calling them seeds, a word that made it clear ideas need nurturing before they grow into products. For this lab, I created the Seed Development Framework to help each participant grow concepts from the ideas we generated together.

I brought in external perspectives, too: five tools from design and business strategy practice: negative brainstorming, point-of-view brainstorming, ecosystem mapping, the value proposition canvas, and the Business Model Canvas. I taught each one, and participants picked the approach that made sense to them.

Session three was the share-out. Ten of the 12 companies presented concepts for co-creation: nine value propositions in all, because two companies built theirs together. Every one was feasible, desirable, and served American Family’s vision. One of my team members created the Value Alignment Rating under my guidance. It scored each pitch on disruptive thinking, tangible customer value, and the strength of its value proposition. The rating went into the summary deck their leaders saw later, so executives on both sides could gauge the value co-development could create.

This was a co-creation lab, not a hackathon. Picking favorites in front of competitors would have burned the introductions the lab existed to earn, so we thanked every company for building something new with us and moved forward with each one separately. Two companies chose not to pitch, and we respected that. Co-creating takes more time and work than pitching something already built.

This lab was the first assignment for my newly formed design strategy team. Two direct reports rode shotgun while I designed it, and four people from my peers’ teams joined them as facilitators. All four later joined my team.