MMA embarks into a journey to become MMA2.0 by conducting an experimental, community-based approach. New management principles, behaviours, knowledge programs and technologies are developed and tested by professional communities, shared within a fast-growing Campus (the emerging social network of MMA) and officialized by a Governance Body. All along the way, MM@cademie is coaching MMA into understanding the benefits of this new organizational body !

Context

MMA is a multi-specialized insurer, member of Groupe Covea, the leading mutual insurance group in France. The company has a turnover exceeding €6 bn, 7200 employees and a geographically diversified network of 1800 agencies. It is best known in France for having led a revolution in communication and advertising, and remains the favorite insurance brand in the country.

In 2007, the company was finishing integration of two major acquisitions and had launched several initiatives intended at reunifying the existing cultures into one single culture. It had decided to transform its emerging university into an R&D focused academy, MM@cademie, that would identify and explore key societal, technological and managerial trends impacting MMA's business in the near future.

Triggers

Back in 2007, MMA was coming out of five years of acquisitions and organizational change. The new, common culture was not yet fully deployed and relations with the agents needed to evolve dramatically if MMA was to keep its competitive position.

MM@cademie had identified key triggers that are driving evolution of the insurance landscape : speed of technology evolution, evolving consumer behaviour and a revolution in insurable risks. Pascale Leclercq, Strategy Director, and Mithra Sarrafi, MM@cademy General Secretary, were looking into how to measure the probable impact of these evolutions. At that moment, we at Talent Club & Boostzone Institute were starting research on how social technologies and the corresponding evolution in social interaction would impact management and organizational principles.

As chance had it, we met at a Conference on Wikinomics by Don Tapscott and quickly decided to start experimenting together. The key insight was that we needed to change management and professional behaviours to allow for a different type of collaboration (one that is not hierarchical or project-based).

Three key decisions got us started :

MMA CEO decided to lead the Governance body of our Collaborative Way initiative (Strategic Committee);
We designed a structure in which to experiment new management ways (Professional Communities)
MMA bought and implemented from the outset a community platform from an existing vendor.

We also decided to adopt, right from the outset, a totally "web 2.0" behaviour : collaborative, open, transparent and, last but not least, connected !

Key Innovations & Timeline

Experimenting with existing programs

We started out by acting as a ressource to existing programs or projects. As we were setting the new collaborative platform, we identified seven initiatives (personal development, continuous improvement, mobilization, process improvement, regional management) that were in need of central support and the group thought could benefit from improved collaboration.

During these first experiences, we developed our first operational tools (community structure and tools, basecamp support) and fine-tuned them. We worked at at least two levels :

At the people level, we fought to convince and recruit volunteers as facilitators for our communities;
At the IT level, we tried to stress how new social technologies would actually change relationships, and therefore profesionnal behaviours and management (and, eventually, organization). One of our initiatives was successful enough to attract interest from IT department and serve as a pilot initiative to test MS Sharepoint.

We also concentrated on getting new members for our community platform (that had been dubbed "the Campus"), and by launching conversations on a wide range of subjects. Conversations were successful, and even impacted business, as some specialized agents were identified through conversations. It was actually one of these conversations, launched by Pascale (what rules for collaboration ?) that pushed us to a second, more structured phase.

Building Collaborative Way building blocks

The conversation about rules showed that people at MMA had important questions about how the Campus was managed, about what rules applied for what could be communicated or not, what could be shared internally or externally, about who had permissions to publish what. People were in need of directions, rules, governance, as the new collaborative environment interfered with their day to day work; at the same time, they were clear that it was NEW or revised rules that were needed.

We therefore launched a first "management innovation" community that focused on searching for "what rules" to apply to this new "collaborative way".

At MMA, community-based work is very different from classic work. Community members first work to establish a high level of trust and to reach a common understanding on the community objective. They are challenged to push this objective further and translate it into key issues for the organization.

This first management innovation community was very creative, and set the foundations for a number of management experimentations that would span two years. It identified that new rules were indeed needed, but it also identified the need for renewed corporate governance, a new IT environement and a new knowledge management approach.

Following approval by the Strategic Committee, new management innovation communities were launched : MMAPEDIA, focused on a new collaborative knowledge development and sharing strategy and platform; MMABook, focused on inventing a corporate social network adapted to the specific relationships that drive value in the insurance field, and more specifically within MMA.

During these first months, community facilitators appeared as a key success factor for communities. These were not web2.0 type community managers, they were much closer to management roles, but with some behaviours that come from web2.0 usage (contribution-minded, open to discussion, positive attitude, risk-takert, ...).

It was therefore important that the CEO sponsored a community (Anim'Acteurs) that worked on community structure and on this facilitator role that was seen as a future management role. This community was and is very diverse, with people from operations, IT, HR, legal, ..., open to all facilitators that want to join, and a real sounding board for basecamp. It has worked on the design of the community structure and of the "animateur" (facilitator) role, from a management point of view.

A last innovation community has just been launched about wider management evolution.

Allowing for open-innovation, based on personal initiative

Appart from launching these management innovation communities, basecamp has kept an open mind to all personal initiatives, and provided support so that a professional community was launched everytime a request was received. Some of these communities have been popular, others have failed utterly, and a few have proven very difficult to accept for existing managers, as they proposed new approaches (and namely communication approaches) that needed an evolution of existing management ways.

The conversational activity in the Campus has kept growing as new communities emerged and new members joined in. It should be noted that all this activity was virtual but with a very "real" support, as MM@cademie has been present at every company location to present its activities and explain the evolutions it has sponsored. These physical events are key to building trust and continuing expanding support for management evolution.

The physical side of collaboration has been key, as new behaviours and usage represent a gap from exisiting ones; Campus members might have felt even more isolated would their relations with other communities or the Campus had been only virtual. As it is, this isolation has been an issue.

Testing the new organizational model in a key strategic challenge

As awareness of the Community model has grown, operational requests are flowing in to basecamp.

One of the businesses of the company has decided to lunch a Community to solve collaboration problems that could not be solved before, and namely transversal collaboration amongst different departments. These communities are working at two levels :

First, they are trying to avoid politic and functional barriers by working in the community;
Secondly, they are forcing top management to collaborate differently by mobilizing them not only for decision making, but also for collaborative problem solving.

Getting ready for full deployment

Our project is now getting ready for wider deployment, that should be based on three pillars:

How improved collaboration impacts existing processes and businesses;
How new structures (communities) provide a vehicle to implement programs, projets, activities that were not possible yesterday;
How the collective intelligence of the group can be tapped beyond conversations.

In getting ready to succeed, MM@cademie is transfering knowledge & skills to operations and functions, and is also transfering leadership of these initiatives to them. This transfer is best understood as organizational coaching, as, in accepting this role, functions (such as HR or IT) are almost forced to change themselves in their management ways.

Challenges & Solutions

As in any transformation program, key challenges concern behaviours and engagement. The fact that this project runs in a "beta mode", without a grand plan that would be designed in advance, that it evolves by applying sound collaboration principles to existing situations, makes it even more challenging. It is more difficult to engage people in innovation and R&D than it is to manage their contribution in a carefully articulated project, with well-defined objectives.

Our answer to this challenge has been double:

From an individual point of view (behaviours and management ways), we have adopted from the outset the collaboration attitude and behaviours that we plan to see deployed in the company, and we have made the volunteers adopt these ways, even when it seems difficult. We have first adopted very open, almost web2.0 like attitudes, and have afterwards worked with community members in making them much more professional (accountability, governance);
From an organization point of view, we have insisted in structuring very carefully our professional communities. Instead of working on what the company will look like in some years, when collaboration is deployed, we have worked on making sure that collaboration happens at the community level, and we expect from this new community work the innovations that will transform MMA.

A second set of challenges concerns departments that are directly impacted by changes coming from the usage of social technologies, that is IT, HR and PR. Concerning these challenges, our answer has been to try and work in a co-design mode as often as possible.

We still have some challenges ahead

Adoption of structural changes to the organisation (HR practices, including dévelopment, evaluation, recognition and compensation);
Increase speed of decision making
Tackle French regulatory context and issues
Deploy collaboration externally, to live up to the company new baseline, "your new insurance social network".

Benefits & Metrics

The number of Campus members has grown above 3000 and there are more than 100 active communities. There are also more than 100 articles on MMAPEDIA, even if this initiative has but started. These are the most important metrics that can be followed by basecamp, appart from the social activity level of the members.

Another way to look at benefits is to consider how many new talents have been identified through communities. Almost every community is an opportunity for its facilitator (or animateur) to prove himself beyond what his current role allows. In this respect, MMA has so far identified (and promoted) a handful of persons because of their involvment with communities. More than 20 have been given access to strategic projects or decisions and participated in professional situations that were beyond their existing scope.

Finally, MMA itself has decided to work on its positionning. The new baseline has become "your new insurance social network".

Lessons

Reflecting on what we have done so far, we underline the following as really important:

Focus at the same time on organization and people evolution, working with a co-design mindset. Even though the basecamp team is at the forefront of management thinking, every innovation that we spotted was developed and formalized by a group of volunteers within a professional community. What is interesting is that a professional community is different from existing structures and that volunteer based work is different from classic command & control;
Adopt a "beta mindset" for technology adoption. We launched a community platform at the beginning of our work, and have worked with our vendor to improve it ever since. Everytime a new initiative needed a new kind of technology, we had executive support to test it. It was the case for MMApedia and MMABook;
Always adopt a positive atittude in regard to people that resist change. Fact is, they are just doing their job and keeping with their responsibilities ! So the best is to work on opening management eyes, (we had a group of volunteers visit several companies in Sillicon Valley, have had several top-to-top meetings with French leading vendor Dassault Systèmes, and conducted external interviews).
Turn leadership upside down. We had a huge impact from the leadership team as MM@cademie was challenged to spot key changes needed, experiment, test feasibility and support (within the organization) and then present to the Strategic Committee. This last played its role as a partner, but has never set directions nor proposed changes. It has ensured that whatever was experimented was adoptable without a major disruption.

Credits

The story that is described here has many leading actors, that deserve all credit:

First, Pascale Leclerc, for her intuition, vision, resilience and capacity to maintain course no matter what conditions prevail;
Secondly, all Campus members, with a particular note for the Anim'acteur group, who have experimented new ways of working, sometimes in difficult conditions, and have participated in designing the key innovations that are described here;
We are indebted to Dominique Turcq, whose thought leadership got us going in the first place;
The whole story was possible because it got continued executive sponsorship, which means that credit goes first to MMA CEO, Christian Baudon.

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