The underwriters’ meeting

One of the things Risk/R does for you is helps you cut down on meetings. We think meetings are mostly bad, and that you can largely eliminate them from your work day. Consider the following:

• Real work rarely happens when more than 5 people are involved.
• Most meetings are limited to information transfer purposes, at very low bandwidth; no actual work is getting done.
• people tend to be more concerned with politics than results when put on the spot in front of their peers.

One of the most common meetings in insurance is the underwriters’ meeting. All the team members gather with the Chief Underwriter, and everyone discusses the accounts they are working on. In my experience, these meetings go like this:

• Every person tries to say as little as possible, so the spotlight moves on quickly to the next person.
• Only the rosy view of any account is spoken of. No one comes out and says “I’m not sure how to win this business.” And it’s too complicated to get into the details now, right?
• Nobody wants to surprise the CUO. He is a busy man, after all. You don’t want him inquiring too deeply about the emails he hasn’t been cc’d on.
• At no point does a senior person get to help a junior person.
• At no point does any real work happen. At no point is any value created.
• The CUO leaves feeling like he has only heard a partial version of the story, and will have to dig deeper before he can make a difference on any accounts.

Do you see how tragic this is? The people in the meeting are professionals. They don’t hate each other. They have the same incentives.

Risk/R fixes a lot of the root causes of this malaise. When a team is using it, they know which accounts the other team members are working on. They can see the correspondence progressing in real time. Team members can look over each others’ shoulders and offer guidance: “Hey, your broker is asking for endorsement X, I’ve seen that before on another risk, take a look at how we resolved it.” Importantly, the CUO can involve himself at will, without having his concentration destroyed by hundreds of cc’d emails every day.

When a team uses Risk/R, the underwriting meeting — if you even need one anymore— requires no awkward explanations or politics. Everybody knows what they need to know beforehand, and they begin solving problems straight away.

Much healthier, right?