Arity drives continuous progress using LEGO® SERIOUS PLAY®

We don’t want to just navigate industry change; we want to discover it, map it out, and support our customers on their journeys to success. Because of this, continuous progress is foundational to who we are as a team and how we operate.

With the world changing as fast as it is – really, faster than ever – Arity strives to break the mold so that our customers can continue to be the industry changemakers and leaders they are.

Our team members pave the way. Here’s one recent example of how they prioritized continuous progress, leveraging unique methods like LEGO® SERIOUS PLAY® to ideate the future of auto insurance.

The goal: Go from Red Ocean to Blue Ocean

Since Arity’s inception in 2016, our team has been using data to shape the future of mobility – which includes being at the forefront of telematics to help auto insurance carriers price more accurately and fairly than ever before.

Today, all the top 10 U.S. auto insurers offer a telematics solution to their customers. However, we know the evolution of telematics will not and should not stop here.

Our team strives to continuously bring new and innovative ideas to the market to help our customers stay ahead of the game. To do that, we engaged Brianna Sylver of Sylver Consulting to think past Red Ocean and vision our Blue Ocean.

Red Ocean versus Blue Ocean

• A Red Ocean is the known market space, where companies try to outcompete competitors to establish a greater share of the existing market.

• A Blue Ocean is the unknown, uncontested marketspace – ultimately creating new demand in a new market.

In pursuit of our Blue Ocean, i.e., our next big thing, Sylver Consulting kicked off a four-phase process, designed to help us capture that uncontested marketspace.

Four phases to Blue Ocean

1. Exploratory interviews with insurance executives to learn their priorities along with pain points they want to solve.
2. What-if workshop among Arity team members to take the learnings from the interviews and ideate new potential telematics offerings.
3. Test interviews with insurance executives to see which ideas resonate and which do not.
4. Translating Insight into Action workshop to define next steps to capture that uncontested marketspace.

The roadblock: Breaking out of the Red Ocean

After the first three phases of work, it was clear that breaking out of the Red Ocean was going to be a bigger task than expected. Our team, along with the insurance executives engaged in the study, were struggling to see past what’s already being done to uncover uncharted territory.

However, despite the roadblock, the team was determined to push themselves to unlock those out-of-the-box ideas. So, they pivoted to reassess the approach.

That’s when Sylver Consulting suggested a LEGO® SERIOUS PLAY® workshop, believing that the 3D approach to modeling strategy would service to “break the script” on how our team has viewed market opportunity to date.

The solution: Unlock potential with LEGO® SERIOUS PLAY®

Based on the concept of “hands-on knowledge,” LEGO® SERIOUS PLAY® is a method for facilitating thinking and problem-solving for individuals, teams, and organizations. Using Legos as a communications tool, our team members crafted their responses to three prompts from Sylver Consulting:

1. Who and what is Arity?
2. Arity’s business environment
3. What then, is our Blue Ocean vision for tomorrow?

Each team member built their own response model to each question. Then, the group would present their model, explaining their rationale behind it. Of course, everyone had their own unique perspective for each prompt, differing based on the area of the business they work in, who they work with, and the function they perform.

But the next step was to combine everyone’s ideas, creating aligned models for each prompt so that everyone was on the same page for each.

This 3D approach to strategy supported the team to understand the complexity of the market and the pockets of opportunity available in it. This approach helped to highlight in a tangible and concrete way what the “Blue Ocean vision of tomorrow” looks like. It also highlighted where Arity might gain additional competitiveness in the existing Red – i.e., the current telematics marketplace.

This is only one example of how Team Arity strives for continuous progress. Want to learn more? Explore our resources to see how our solutions are driving innovation across industries – in auto insurance and beyond.