This year marks 20 years of work for me (including five years of building & running Protagion), so is a natural point to reflect on the journey so far… Two decades ago, I completed my actuarial exams (in the Investments, Pensions, Life Insurance and General/P&C Insurance specialisms) and started my first job in the finance team of a large financial services company, valuing the insurance liabilities of its business operations across Africa. I’d worked in that team previously as a vacation student / intern, so was aware of what I was getting myself into, and it proved a helpful first role. 

Of course, my university classmates started their first roles around then too. We’d made it through a demanding 4-year business degree (or 3-year science degree plus honours for some), and arrived innocently into our first jobs. It was around 20 of us who survived, as the programme was notorious for forcing people to evaluate what they really wanted career-wise and weeding out many (60%-80% of the naive teenagers who began – they mostly shifted to other degree streams).

​A number of the survivors had bursaries, and perhaps extra impetus to see things through until graduation. So, fast forward 20 years, and what has happened to our group of survivors? Read more to find out… 

Many times over my career so far, I’ve opted to work in roles ‘on the edge’, often between established business units or sectors. Serving as a bridge or interface between them. Collaborating and sharing ideas from one context into others. And/or building new functions to galvanise change. Through experience, I’ve honed skills in identifying what inherent assumptions are being made by different parties and where interaction has broken down. In fact, silos in businesses originally develop for good reasons: the given area needs to become more specialised to extract greater value and efficiency, putting in place more procedures, governance and structure to do so. Over time though, it ringfences itself too much, atrophying in place and unable to adapt to changes around it... 

In this article, I explore how established organisations can change successfully, and the stages a new ‘initiative’ or function goes through as it becomes a greater part of how the business operates. Driving adoption of new technologies or approaches across a business (and/or industry) are examples: too early and the sparkle could fizzle out, too late and you’re left far behind. Becoming data-driven or digital-first, say. Another is product development, introducing new solutions (perhaps backed by new organisational capabilities built or bought) to lead the business into the future. 

Successful collaboration requires that we know enough about each of the disparate worlds to build trust with all of them, encouraging them to look up and outwards in pursuit of new opportunities, to make decisions, and to take sustainable action. Helpful skills to galvanise change include: an ability to connect the dots plus technical depth in one or more areas for credibility, communication, relationship building to cooperate across functions, and critical thinking (especially matching a possible solution with a business problem). At a team-level, you want a multi-skilled group, experts from different domains working together with innovation drivers familiar with design thinking and agile methods. 

A significant part of change in a business is about bringing the people along: evangelising a new direction, shifting mindsets, promoting adoption of the new approach/product/service/technology, hosting training & demos… And, these days, a meaningful proportion of my work involves these ‘change management’, ‘transformation’ and modernisation elements. Many people naturally have anxiety about how changes might affect their own careers, and the effort involved in upskilling themselves. I very much believe human intelligence will continue to be needed (in addition to the automation and speed that artificial intelligence can bring) in order to ask questions, identify problems, think of possible answers – perhaps some not encountered before – and create solutions. The visibility of an ‘innovation’ team, and its ongoing business achievements, is crucial to winning hearts and minds. 

The affected people should be part of the process of proposing new ideas – great ones can come from enhancing existing processes as well as exploring emerging technologies and experimenting. And, it’s not really surprising too that an innovation process shares strong similarities with a product development lifecycle: aspects such as concept, feasibility, exploration, experiment, design, pilot, build, pricing, signoff, launch, ongoing management… Many processes include go / no-go gates too where ideas are shelved to focus resources on more promising ones. 

I’ve seen these thoughts play out in different contexts, such as pricing & product development, financial reporting, investment management, and data science & analytics functions. It’s true that change may be prompted by different drivers (regulations, competitors, technology and more…), however, the organisation needs to evolve new ways of working, perhaps new departments or operating models, to respond. Read more to follow along as I unpack how the functions evolve over time / the different phases organisations go through, from early activity to intermediate to advanced, by which stage it becomes business as usual.