On 24 March 2023, a post shared by Émile Servan-Schreiber invited businesses to join an energy-sobriety challenge alongside EDF, La Poste Groupe and Groupe Caisse des Dépôts. The proposed exercise was intercompany brainstorming: collect useful ideas for reducing energy demand, identify priorities and share the ideas across organisations.
The invitation followed several months of preparation. On 5 December 2022, Servan-Schreiber announced a webinar for 16 December with EDF and La Poste. The advertised speakers were himself, EDF’s Idriss Ismael and La Poste’s Julien Le Blanc. The subject was how employee collective intelligence could help organisations prepare their energy-sobriety plans.
From gathering ideas to setting priorities
A 5 January 2023 post explained the proposed use of Hypermind’s STORM platform. It reported that Julien Le Blanc had previously gathered ideas from 100 employees while working on La Poste’s strategic plan. The platform was described as identifying high and low priorities, areas of consensus and concrete proposals. The 100-person figure refers to that earlier strategic-plan exercise.
Hypermind’s official STORM product description separates idea generation, prioritisation and evaluation. Participants submit comparable proposals, then allocate scarce tokens to ideas they consider especially likely or unlikely to succeed. Decision makers review the resulting priorities and disagreements. The product asks for judgements about prospects, rather than simply asking which proposal participants like.
That makes the challenge relevant to forecasting through its focus on expected effectiveness. An idea’s popularity and its prospects can differ. Asking people to assess those prospects gives a manager another kind of input when choosing where to commit resources. The journal’s discussion of forecasting incentives considers the related problem of how rewards shape collective answers.
A wider business gathering
On 13 February 2023, Servan-Schreiber reshared Le Blanc’s report that 20 large companies had gathered at La Poste’s headquarters to launch the initiative. Le Blanc named organisations including Air France, AXA, BNP Paribas, Capgemini, Renault Group and Veolia. His recap credited Servan-Schreiber with explaining the value of involving many employees, making employee knowledge central to the proposed challenge.
The March update described STORM as helping La Poste classify ideas and identify transformation priorities. An interview published by Équilibre des Énergies in August 2025 corroborates that La Poste launched a collective-intelligence challenge with Hypermind in spring 2023. This places the earlier invitation within a programme the company subsequently described as part of its energy-sobriety work.
