A recent edition of Harvard Business Review carried an article entitled, “The Hard Truth About Innovative Cultures”. At first, we thought it was about Greek yogurt. Then we read it and learned it’s about the five characteristics of effective corporate cultures. Here they are:

1. Tolerance for Failure but No Tolerance for Incompetence
2. Willingness to Experiment but Highly Disciplined
3. Psychologically Safe but Brutally Candid
4. Collaboration but with Individual Accountability
5. Flat but Strong Leadership.

This is the first in a series of five posts in which we will examine each of those characteristics from the perspective of our own organization.

Fine Lines

Any discussion about the relationship between failure and intolerance has to start with distinctions and balance. The article says this:

A tolerance for failure is an important characteristic of innovative cultures … And yet for all their focus on tolerance for failure, innovative organizations are intolerant of incompetence.

To strike the appropriate balance, we tend to distinguish mistakes from failure. We tolerate honest mistakes resulting from clear thought, sincere intents, and unforeseen eventualities. We don’t tolerate failures resulting from thoughtlessness, carelessness, or recklessness. And we take to heart a conversation we once heard over lunch at an industry conference:

Person 1: I heard one of your people made a huge mistake.

Person 2: Yep. It cost me $50,000.

Person 1: Did you get rid of the guy?

Person 2: Why would I do that? He didn’t piss off the client. And I just paid $50,000 for his education.

As far as we’re concerned, failing to try is a bigger indicator of incompetence than making an honest mistake in a sincere, well-thought-out effort. And lessons hard-learned are often the most effective.

A Calculated Gamble

There’s no such thing as perfection. We neither demand it nor expect it. But we do expect conscientiousness. We do expect honesty, integrity, and thoughtfulness. And we do expect people’s best efforts, even as we recognize anyone’s best efforts may fall short on occasion. It’s the gamble you take in business, in hiring, in being willing to trust and observe before you judge.

That approach has worked for us since 2001. And it’s kept our culture active, even though we’re not in the yogurt business.

Changing our approach now might be a mistake … or worse.

With everyone from consultants to analysts, from trade publications to software vendors, from insurtechs to FOMOs writing about the future of insurance, we started thinking we might be conspicuous by our absence. So, in the interest of living on the bleeding edge of insurance prognostication (don’t worry … we have lots of styptic), here are our modest contributions to the burgeoning breadth and bulk of literature on the topic.

Prediction #1: Some Stuff Will Change

Given the evolving nature of technology and the ever-increasing rate of change, we can expect a veritable plethora of things to become increasingly prevalent. With IoT and Big Data bombarding us with more and more information for which we have to try and find uses, we’ll figure something out. With IoT and Big Data feeding telematics devices and precipitating usage-based insurance, we’ll see more individualized rates as standard personal-lines products, in particular, become ever-more commoditized. And with GPS and insurtechs breeding the pursuit of leisure in driverless cars, there are sure to be emerging market opportunities in life insurance, if not funeral insurance.

Prediction #2: Some Stuff Will Never Change

Given the immutable nature of an industry as highly regulated yet non-standardized as insurance, technology will never be adopted as fast as the consultants, the analysts, the trade publications, the software vendors, the insurtechs, and the FOMOs say it will. State DOIs and the NAIC will reduce the number of regulations by which insurers must comply right about the time Pee Wee Herman establishes the first colony on Mars. Implementations will still have to be conducted deliberately, carefully, and expertly. And software will still need to be tested to make sure it works as well as the consultants, the analysts, the trade publications, the software vendors, the insurtechs, and the FOMOs say it will.

The Moral of the Story

The ball on which we’re all supposed to be keeping an eye is the present. We can keep the other eye on the future, of course. But there’s work to be done right now. The prognosticators will continue to make a living by prognosticating. If there weren’t a market for it, they wouldn’t do it. But the rest of us in the industry still have to do what we do in the best interests of policyholders, or we’ll all be out of business.

Who’d have thought ignoring The Next Big Thing might be the future of insurance?

We firmly believe in the notion that anything is possible. If a person puts his mind to something, or if a group of people commits to working together to accomplish something previously unaccomplished, we’re among the first to believe it can be done. But believing anything is possible isn’t the same as believing everything is possible.

By the same token, common wisdom has it that the shortest route to any destination is a straight line. Along similar lines (no pun intended), the shortest route to the resolution of any question, particularly a business question, is a straight answer.

Presuming we’re all in agreement on those two points (why wouldn’t we be?), where does that leave us? We don’t know that we can answer for everyone. But we certainly can answer for ourselves.

Function Follows Facility

We make software to perform specific functions for a specific industry. Insurance. It does lots of things insurance software needs to do: It administers policies and claims. It manages billing. It provides business intelligence. It permits access through portals and mobile devices. And it features a WYSIWYG Design Studio that lets you design, configure, and manage the entire Finys Suite; to develop and deploy products, states, and lines of business; or to quickly change any of those things with or without our help, or any degree in between, depending on your needs and desires.

As much as it pains us to admit it, the Finys Suite doesn’t make coffee. It doesn’t play the violin. It won’t make us better looking.

The fact of the matter is, we don’t want the Suite do any of those things (with the possible exception of making us better looking). Our customers don’t need it to do those things. And we’ll never tell our customers or prospects the Suite will do everything they might want it to do. With their input and a legitimately demonstrable need, we can likely get the Suite to do anything they might like it to do. But we won’t make impractical promises, avoid their questions, or give circuitous answers to those questions.

Changing the subject, or avoiding it, won’t help anyone.

Some businesses have lists of objectives that are better measured in yards, rather than word-counts. If there’s a way to prioritize and manage that many objectives, maybe that’s okay. We, on the other hand, tend to think there are two business objectives that (should) supersede all others:

1. Acquire customers by developing the right product
2. Retain those customers by delivering the right service(s).

While it may not seem like it, #1 is the easier of the two objectives. Creating a new product is like spring training: It’s a new season, a fresh start. Everything is fresh, green, hopeful, and eminently possible. With a win in front of us and the wind at our backs, all we imagine is succeeding. But that success precipitates the challenges manifest in #2.

The Day After

After developing the product and earning customers, the product has to be kept functionally relevant. Since we can’t eliminate change or anticipate the needs of every customer, #2 requires the constant accommodation of change and constant communication with customers. It takes a profound working knowledge of the industry (or industries) in which the product is expected to perform. It takes a combination of open-mindedness and decisiveness to know the product may, at some point, do this, but it will never do that (regardless of the precise definitions of this and that), as well as the courage to tell customers what the product will and won’t do — and why or why not.

Most important, perhaps, is the willingness and the determination to look ahead. No one can predict the future. But communicating with customers, listening to their needs, anticipating others, and demonstrating a commitment to remain professionally concerned and functionally relevant goes a long way to achieving two of the so-called soft objectives — the trust and confidence of your customers. Look at it this way: Functionality can always be added after the fact. But trust can never be back-filled.

First steps are crucial. Next steps are make-or-break.

It’s About Philosophy

Business objectives are great. Good intentions are terrific (and the stuff, of course, of which a particular road is paved). But over-promising and under-delivering is not a philosophy by which to earn long-term success.

That’s why we’re thinking about making a poster out of this strip:

 

 

 

We’re tech people. We’ve always thought we’re tech people so insurance people wouldn’t have to be tech people. And we’ve always felt like we were alone in that thinking. But the tide may be starting to turn.

The February edition of Best’s Review ran an article entitled, “Generation Next”, contending that the traditional focus of the insurance industry on technical competence (though not limited to technological competence) may be too narrow to carry it into the future. As Limore Zilberman, a consultant at the executive search firm, Russell Reynolds Associates, put it:

People were hired because of their technical prowess and because of their technical acumen and their technical contribution … [but]  the landscape of leadership is going to change. The expectations of leadership are going to change. Our technical talent is not necessarily well-poised to take on broader leadership capabilities.

That seems about right. To put it another way: With all the bigger fish insurers have to fry, technical talent may be a red herring.

Leaders Lead

In arguing that the insurance industry focus on specialists needs to broaden sufficiently to include generalists in leadership positions, Zilberman elaborates on the characteristics of the people she believes are better suited to fill the leadership roles of the future:

They’re agile, they’re adaptable, they’re quick learners, they’re good problem solvers, they’re forward-looking … Those types of people can be put at the helm to manage the lower ranks of the organization that might carry more of that technical expertise.

At risk of seeming to quibble with terminology, we take issue with Ms. Zilberman’s notion of managing the lower ranks. (We even find lower to be a tad condescending; although, we do take her point.) We take issue because leaders lead. Managers manage. And those two jobs, along with their respective responsibilities, are quite different.

But that difference in perspective on vocabulary notwithstanding, Ms. Zilberman and the article are correct. The insurance industry does need to think more broadly. And it does need to embrace well-rounded, critical-thinking generalists as its leaders.

If continue to favor leaders whose strength are technical (linear) thinking, as opposed to general (conceptual) thinking, we should be careful what we wish for.