Helping insurance leaders capture a new market through a business simulation

Client need

A global professional services firm delivering risk advisory and insurance solutions to companies, institutions, and individuals was undergoing a strategic transformation to accelerate growth, increase operational efficiency, and prepare for the future. To succeed, this transformation would require investments to streamline processes and platforms, along with a shift in how people work. To improve operations, the organization had already segmented the business and reduced layers, attempting to drive simplicity, transparency, and distributed decision making across the firm. However, adapting to the new operating model would require systemic change.

The organization’s chief human resources officer (CHRO) engaged BTS to help jumpstart the strategic transformation. BTS collaborated with the organization to create a program that would align the broader leadership team, comprised of everyone below the executive committee, to this transformation. The goals of the program was to help leaders translate the new strategy into something meaningful and actionable at their departmental level, and also to catalyze the broader leadership team’s strategy execution.

BTS created a highly contextualized business simulation, including presentations, facilitated discussions, and focused training, all of which were customized for the organization.

Solution

BTS began the design process by interviewing 18 senior executives across the organization. These senior executives included the CEO, COO, CHRO, and presidents of regional divisions. They were selected to provide a broad representation of and perspective on the organization. The goal of this research was to define two broad topic areas:

The Business – understanding the organization's business model, the markets in which it operates, and the unique challenges and opportunities it faces.

The People and Leadership – understanding the behavioral and mindset shifts the organization wanted to see in its people, leadership, and culture.

Following the interviews with top-level executives, BTS conducted eight additional interviews with mid-level executives. This allowed for insight into specific business units and challenges referenced in the previous set of interviews.

Interview responses were distilled into a list of themes and organized into an “impact map.” The map defined the business impact envisioned by the organization and linked it to the knowledge, skills, behaviors, and mindsets the organization sought to foster.

The organization’s steering committee reviewed the impact map with the goal of gaining alignment on their key challenges, desired behavioral shifts, and key business results.

To achieve these behavioral shifts, the company collaborated with BTS to design a business simulation modeled after the company’s business. The simulation created a risk-free, engaging, and fun way to achieve learning objectives, and was composed of three rounds experienced over a two-day program. Each round had a theme with distinct learning points.

Round one was designed for leaders to learn how to optimize today’s business in service of driving long-term profitable growth. This involved gaining an understanding of the business landscape, as well as familiarity with the decisions and trade-offs that such growth requires. Round Two focused on the client, becoming a strategic advisor to clients, and enhancing leaders’ abilities to execute. Round Three prepared leaders for a future of making long-term investments in order to develop a sustainable competitive advantage.

Leaders were divided into teams of five at the beginning of the program. Each team included participants from a diverse array of functional and geographic sections of the organization. The experience was composed of seven main elements:

1. Pre-Work and Introduction – Participants received a pre-start date reading assignment: a detailed case study featuring a fictitious company in a fictitious market environment. The company and market environment described were very similar to the organization and its environment. BTS facilitators kicked off the program by making a case for change, highlighting shifts in the market environment. Participants then broke off into pairs to reflect on those shifts and discuss what the changes meant for them as leaders. Then, BTS facilitators led a discussion wherein participants shared their reflections with the entire group.
2. Strategy Session – In teams of five, leaders came up with a strategy for how they would lead the simulated company.
3. Running the company - In their teams of five, leaders ran their simulated company by making over fifty critical decisions. Each team had their own designated breakout room where they would debate their decisions and enter them into a live digital-simulation platform. Periodically, teams would receive a “Wobbler,” which was an unexpected event that they had to respond to in real time (usually a competitor action, a client issue, or a talent issue). Their decisions impacted their KPIs and market share for each market and segment. Participants “ran the company” for three rounds, which represented a three-year timeframe.
4. Know-Hows – After each round of running the company, participants came back to the main room for a teach-piece or “know-how,” which were skill or knowledge gaps identified as needing to be addressed. After Round One, the topic was “effective decision-making.” For Round Two, it was “future-proofing.” Round Three’s topic was “feedback culture.”
5. Debriefs — With the entire group present, BTS facilitators reviewed the results for each team, linking the decisions that teams made to their performance. Each of the three rounds had a theme, and facilitators emphasized key takeaways related to these themes. At the end of each debrief, facilitators revealed where teams ranked against each other. Participants also received a report showing their team’s annual financial performance, along with another that summarized the competing teams’ performance.
6. Application Session – During these sessions, participants committed to post-program actions, recording them using an electronic tool. Following the completion of the program, participants received follow-up reminders of their commitments at a scheduled cadence.
7. Reflection Sessions — Solo reflections and team reflections were interspersed throughout the two-day program. During the solo reflections, which followed the know-how sessions and debriefs, participants reflected on what they had learned. After the “running the business” segments, participants reflected on their team dynamics. At the end of each day, BTS facilitated short discussions during which participants would share their reflections with the larger group.

To date, ten cohorts have gone through the program since its launch. Each cohort had 25 participants, all just below the C-suite.

At least ten more cohorts, each with a similar number of participants, plan to attend the program next year.

Results

Overall, the program was a great success. The CEO of the Italy division of the company concluded that the BTS program was “much better than any other session of its kind.” The CHRO and the executive team were enamored, and continued to communicate this in subsequent discussions. The organization also extended the original agreement to roll out even more programs.

In the application session section of the program, participants were asked to choose and commit to post-program actions related to on-the-job behaviors. Most frequently, they committed to actions around making informed decisions, prioritizing growth opportunities, and focusing on client relationships. These actions were aligned with the changes that the organization set out to make:

72% of participants stated or planned to have “tough conversations with colleagues about performance and/or with leaders about the business.”

74% of participants stated or planned to “focus on the broader client relationship and anywhere else you can solve risk for the client and align our value proposition.”

54% of participants stated or planned to “prioritize talent development, grow from within, and recruit externally when appropriate.”

Participant testimonials

“I thought this was the best training I’ve ever done. The learning from our team interactions was very illuminating. I loved the risk storming / pre-mortem methodology.”

“It was very useful for me, very genuine, and corresponded with reality. It was entertaining as well.”

“The simulation exercise was an outstanding learning tool. I would be very disappointed never to experience a similar exercise again AND would recommend that our company regularly use the software to measure learning.”

“The simulator tool was very comprehensive and intuitive. Enjoyed the cadence of mixing up sim time and organizational behavior group sessions in different teams. The feedback session was very useful. Excellent team of facilitators.”

Client need

A global multinational pharmaceutical company was at a critical juncture with the appointment of a new CEO. This leadership change spurred a broader effort to reassess and redefine leadership expectations, aiming to improve operations across the organization. The company sought to evaluate its leaders against these new operational standards and identify strengths and gaps in the organization.

Solution

The company partnered with BTS to design and implement bespoke 360-assessments for 1,800 senior leaders and 180-assessments for 9,100 people managers with three or more direct reports. These assessments were strategically developed to provide insights at both an individual and global level, thereby aligning leadership performance with the newly articulated corporate goals.

Results  

The initial rollout of the 360-assessment involved approximately 1,800 leaders globally, including 700 executive directors or higher. The success of this phase led to the program's institutionalization, with the CEO endorsing its annual continuation to support end-of-year performance reviews and broader leadership development.

Encouraged by the results, the company expanded the initiative to include a 180-assessment, reaching an additional 9,100 people managers. This broader assessment effort cascaded the leadership development strategy down through the managerial ranks, reinforcing the company's commitment to fostering an inclusive and effective leadership culture.

The insights gained from these assessments enabled the company to identify where development efforts should be focused, ensuring that leadership across the company is well-equipped to drive future growth and innovation.

Client need

A global consumer packaged goods organization, focused on increasing marketing share and doubling revenue by 2030, identified the strategic levers associated with Revenue Growth Management (RGM) as critical practices for advancing towards their revenue targets. The organization sought to drive organic growth by:

1. Ensuring smart, effective, and insights-driven pricing
2. Actively shifting product mix and customer mix to drive profitability
3. Strategically allocating customer investments
4. Driving the highest return on promotion activity
5. Creating proactive, innovative, insights-driven price pack architecture

The organization was at an early stage of RGM capability, with maturity, understanding, and fluency differing by region. To ensure that all employees within the commercial teams had a common understanding of RGM concepts, the organization partnered with BTS to create a globally-consistent RGM development program for its commercial teams.

Solution

BTS co-created a revenue growth management program in partnership with the organization. The resulting initiative was designed to reach all leader levels within the organization’s commercial function. The journey is self-paced, meaning that participating leaders could access the approx. 4 hours of content at times best suited to their individual schedules. This method of delivery also ensured that the organization had its own people upskill themselves, rather than outsource facilitation.

All commercial employees had the opportunity to experience the 101 modules, while a select few were given the opportunity to go through the 201 modules, which was determined by their performance on assessments that followed the 101 modules. Each module immersed leaders in the learning through business simulations and “moments,” which are thought-provoking scenarios modeled after real-life day-to-day experiences with RGM tensions and decision points.

Leaders went through the program with the goal of achieving their RGM certification – an accolade earned by successfully completing all modules and scoring an 85% on the post-program assessment. The certification also ensured that participating leaders possessed a deeper, more consistent knowledge of RGM, contributing to a more consistent RGM maturity across the globe and, in turn, helping the organization activate its 2030 strategy.

Outcomes

By initiating RGM activities, the organization will:

• Build the growth-and-performance capabilities that address long- and short-term objectives to drive net revenue
• Experience profitable growth that fuels investment and offsets P&L cost pressures
• Center on shopper and consumer insights, staying relevant throughout shifts in consumer behaviors
• Manage customer investment requests with prudence and selectivity
• Take a collective management approach to volume, price, trade, and mix

Beyond offsetting cost inflation, RGM programming will drive profitable growth through a strategic and integrated end-to-end approach. Participating leaders will have developed a deeper knowledge of — and also will have built new mind- and skillsets surrounding — smart pricing, trade architecture, trade investment optimization, mix management, and insights-driven price and package architecture.

By building critical, universal commercial capabilities that are rooted in data, analytics, and shopper/consumer/customer insights, RGM activities will enable each participating representative of the organization to reach more buyers, ultimately achieving their new strategy by increasing growth, consumption, and market share around the world.

Client challenge

Wellstar Health System, one of Georgia’s largest healthcare systems, had already invested heavily in leadership development for senior leaders. But as the organization navigated rapid growth, a major acquisition, and the demands of a shifting healthcare landscape, it became clear that the greatest leadership challenges were happening at the front and midline.

“Some of the greatest leader challenges are really at the front and midline levels… we’ve invested heavily in leadership development, putting more emphasis on our front line and mid-level leadership in terms of outcomes, said Laura Dannels, Chief Talent Officer at the time.

We’re not an organization who believes in just investing in high performers… you’ve got to invest in your entire workforce.”

Wellstar partnered with Sounding Board to bring a more scalable, flexible coaching solution to leaders across the organization.

The solution

Partnering with Sounding Board, Wellstar designed a scalable, personalized coaching program to extend leadership development across the organization while maintaining the quality of one-on-one coaching.

A proprietary 360 assessment, aligned to Wellstar’s leadership behaviors, served as the foundation for each coaching engagement. This ensured development was directly tied to how leaders show up and lead in practice.

“We really wanted to ground the coaching to a framework that matters to our organization,” said Garry Gross, Executive Director of Leadership Development. ‍

“Helping our leaders create an environment where our mission, vision, and values come to life was paramount.”

Program goals:

• Develop leadership capabilities aligned to Wellstar’s mission, vision, and values
• Deliver personalized, relevant development for leaders at all levels
• Strengthen the leadership bench and support succession planning
• Foster a culture of innovation, learning, and engagement

Program overview:

• Personalized, one-on-one coaching for leaders at all levels
• Capability development aligned to Wellstar’s values
  • Serve with Compassion → Builds relationships
  • Pursue Excellence → Drives results, leads teams, and plans strategically
  • Honor Every Voice → Fosters inclusion and respect for differences
• Scalable delivery across frontline, mid-level, and clinical leaders
• Digital tools to track goals, capture insights, and measure progress

This approach made it possible to deliver consistent, high-quality coaching across roles and locations while keeping development relevant to each leader’s day-to-day work.

Results

As the program unfolded, Wellstar began to see a shift in how frontline and mid-level leaders showed up across the organization. Leaders in these critical roles had more consistent support navigating day-to-day challenges, and managers gained better visibility into how their teams were developing. Coaching became a more practical, embedded part of how Wellstar supports leaders in a complex healthcare environment.

Higher engagement and satisfaction

• 96% of participants said the coaching experience was worth the investment
• 99% said they could immediately apply what they learned to their day-to-day work

Measurable leadership growth

Participants reported double-digit growth across leadership capabilities including:

• Executive presence (+16%)
• Organizational collaboration (+14%)
• Strategic thinking (+13%)
• Time management and prioritization (+13%)
• Communication (+11%)

Stronger retention and mobility

• Coached leaders achieved a 90% one-year retention rate
• Retention for coached leaders was 31% higher than non-coached peers
• 3% of participants were promoted into new roles, exceeding organizational goals and industry benchmarks

Learn more about Wellstar’s leadership coaching journey with Sounding Board in this feature in Becker’s Hospital Review.

Client need

For a 175-year-old technology company, competitive advantage isn’t just built on technical innovation: it’s built on leaders who know how to get the best thinking from every person around them. That culture of drawing out ideas, developing people, and driving innovation through engaged teams had been a defining feature of the organization for generations. And it depended on having the right infrastructure to keep developing frontline leaders at scale.

In 2020, that infrastructure was disrupted. The COVID-19 pandemic forced the organization to pivot its in-person development to virtual almost overnight, risking the erosion of frontline leadership capability while simultaneously needing to navigate the broader shocks of the pandemic: supply chain volatility, shifting materials costs, and a workforce managing profound uncertainty.  

Stalling frontline leadership development meant risking productivity, employee engagement, talent retention, job performance, and downstream impacts on quality and operating margin, at a moment when the organization could least afford it.

The question now was how to reimagine frontline leader development to equip thousands of global leaders to continue supporting their teams through disruption, and to ensure the next generation of managers could help their people do their best work under any conditions.

Solution

The client partnered with BTS to reimagine frontline leader development from the ground up, equipping leaders globally with the practical skills, tools, and mindset shifts needed to support their teams in doing great, innovative work.

The partnership began in 2019, and over five years has reached over 1,600 frontline leaders capturing 700+ documented behavior change actions. In 2022, BTS collaborated with the organization to refresh the program to reflect their evolving strategy and develop a sharper focus on supporting a culture of continuous improvement and innovation with coaching and feedback.  

The blended program experience combined the following elements:

• Immersive leadership simulations: Scenario-based experiences placing leaders in realistic situations, surfacing Multiplier and Diminisher tendencies in real time and making the learning immediately personal and actionable

• Multipliers and Diminishers framework: A structured exploration of how leaders either amplify or diminish the intelligence of those around them, including specific “experiments” leaders could use to better understand their own leadership approaches

• Custom leadership frameworks: Including a structured, step-by-step process for having significant feedback conversations, a tool to understand and flex to communication preferences, and a coaching approach designed to help leaders guide team members toward their own solutions, building capability and long-term ownership.

• Structured application sessions — on-the-job practice components designed to bridge the gap between the program experience and day-to-day behavior, giving participants specific frameworks to apply immediately with their teams

• Peer networking and breakout groups — cohort-based learning that participants identified as a standout feature, both for deepening the learning and for building cross-functional relationships that extended beyond the program

• A commitment-capture platform integrated into the program to log participant actions and reinforce behavior change after the program ended; over 670 participant actions were captured across the program’s delivery

Throughout the program, leaders examined the impact of their own behaviors, recognizing where they were unintentionally diminishing their teams, and built new habits around challenging, creating space for mistakes and learning, listening, questioning, giving developmental feedback, and creating ownership. The feedback model gave participants a practical process for the positive and constructive conversations that actually change performance.

Results

More than 1,600 frontline leaders and individual contributors have participated in the program—the population closest to daily execution, quality, and operations. A recent impact study told a clear story about the effects of the program across participants:  

100% of participants reported actively applying what they learned. 59% reported producing significant, measurable business impact, with concrete evidence to describe it.

The results weren’t theoretical. One engineering leader restructured how his team developed project plans, creating space for debate and ownership instead of coming in with the answer. His team exceeded their quality target by 10 percentage points and accelerated the project timeline by +4 months.

One production leader used the feedback model to coach a struggling supervisor and cascade the process across his entire leadership layer. His unit reached #1 performance in its division, improving a key quality KPI by more than 18% year-over-year. A department head with over a decade in leadership set new production records after learning to flex his communication style and draw out quieter team members. And a development lab supervisor used the program to clarify her leadership identity, earn a promotion, and coach her direct report to one as well.

The study also confirmed that when managers actively supported participants post-program, the likelihood of significant business impact increased substantially, shaping the organization’s next phase of reinforcement and cohort follow-up.

For an organization whose competitive advantage rests on the innovation and intelligence of its people, the program gave its leaders something technical training rarely delivers: the confidence, the tools, and the self-awareness to make everyone around them better.

Testimonials

“The program gave me greater confidence to try new things as a leader. It helped me realize what I do and what I don’t do.”  - HR Leader

“The skills I learned in the training helped me be more efficient. It helped me do the right thing, right away.” - Production Manager

“Feedback is very important to create a positive environment; and how to [give] feedback is a specific skill I learned from this training and how to share constructive feedback.” - Production Leader

Client need

A large U.S.-based health insurance organization operating at the center of a complex national ecosystem had already made a serious investment in enterprise AI. Leadership was not experimenting at the edges. They were leaning in.

Capability and commitment existed across the organization, but unevenly. Some teams were already pushing boundaries. Others hadn't yet found their footing. Most of the gains had come in personal productivity. Valuable, but the core work itself had not yet fundamentally changed. The opportunity was to go deeper, to move from AI-assisted individuals to AI-reinvented workflows.

Across the health insurance landscape, pressure was intensifying. Medicaid and government program contracts were becoming more competitive. Decision cycles were faster and more analytics-driven. Clinical evidence was evolving rapidly. Regulatory scrutiny was high. Security risks were constant. AI was no longer a future conversation. It was a present expectation.

Inside the organization, world-class experts were still constrained by manual processes.

Specialized teams were synthesizing large volumes of complex, fast-moving information, working to keep pace with an environment where the inputs never stopped changing. The work required deep expertise and judgment, and it also demanded repetitive processing that consumed days when it needed to take hours.

Other teams faced pressure where speed and precision directly influenced competitive outcomes. Manual approaches were creating lag at exactly the moments when faster insight mattered most.

Across functions, the pattern was consistent. Highly trained professionals were spending valuable time on low-leverage tasks, stitching together data, transforming files, and correlating inputs that AI could handle.

Leadership understood that AI licenses alone would not create advantage. To compete in an increasingly analytics-driven insurance environment, expertise had to scale. Insight had to move faster. Teams needed to reinvent how core work happened.

Solution

BTS partnered with the organization to move from AI access to AI application.

Through a series of focused design sprints, intact teams worked on their highest-value workflows using our GROUNDING → EXPERIMENT → BUILD → AMPLIFY methodology. The structure was simple and disciplined. Set context. Experiment quickly. Build against real work. Create a path to scale.

Participants brought their actual work into the room. Analytical frameworks. Competitive and operational documents. Risk and intelligence inputs. Data pipelines.

No generic demos. No abstract hypotheticals.

The turning point came when AI began working on their actual content.

Research syntheses that previously took days began structuring themselves in minutes. Competitive analysis that once required manual review surfaced patterns instantly. Data transformation workflows streamlined in real time.

Skepticism shifted to possibility.

We positioned AI as augmentation, not replacement. In a sector defined by professional expertise and accountability, that framing was critical. The goal was to elevate expert judgment, not automate it away.

Some teams left with working prototypes. Others left with detailed blueprints aligned to enterprise privacy and security requirements. Another team took away a re-prioritized set of additional tools to incorporate into a HIPAA-compliant environment. Every team left with a redesigned workflow.

Results

In five days, more than 100 leaders advanced 30 priority use cases tied directly to operational performance and competitive growth.

Early outcomes included:

• Significant reduction in manual research synthesis and data preparation
• Faster, more structured competitive intelligence to support high-stakes decisions
• Clear implementation pathways aligned to security and regulatory constraints
• A scalable model for continued AI-enabled workflow reinvention

Just as important was the mindset shift.

Participants stopped viewing AI as a tool sitting outside their work and began treating it as embedded infrastructure for how work gets done.

“This showed immediate relevance to our work.”

“Now I understand what’s actually possible for my team.”

“We just accomplished in two hours what used to take us two months.”

In a U.S. health insurance market where insight, speed, and precision directly influence who wins and who grows, the organization moved decisively from AI access to AI advantage.

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