Using Design Thinking For Insurance Innovation

Paul Ricard
Hi everyone, and welcome to Oliver Wyman’s Reinventing Insurance podcast. I’m your host, Paul Ricard. Today I’m talking to Jason Rome, who is a leader in digital strategy and customer experience at Method, which is the design arm of GlobalLogic. Welcome, Jason.

Jason Rome

Hey, great to be here.

Paul

Jason, why don’t we start with a brief intro? Tell us about yourself, your background, and who you work for.

Jason

Sure. I’ve been with the company for 10 years now, during a time when we rebranded Method, formerly the company I worked for, called Skookum, a bit of a mouthful. I joined Skookum as a product strategist back in 2015 and spent some time on the product side. And then for two  to three years, I was on the sales side of the business, mostly focused on financial services.

I’m based here in Charlotte, North Carolina, and so working in financial services comes with the territory a little bit. I broke off from the sales team a couple of years ago and started our digital strategy customer experience group. In terms of what that group does, it’s a bit of a mix. When we talk to customers, sometimes they talk about innovation, sometimes they talk about transformation, sometimes it’s design thinking, sometimes it’s Agile and product work. These days it might be dual-track Agile or continuous discovery. Really, it’s a lot of similar activities in terms of falling in love with problems, empathizing with our customers, and building really good customer-driven products.

And then, in terms of more recent company history, Skookum was acquired by GlobalLogic in 2019. GlobalLogic also owns a company called Method, based in New York, with a studio in London as well. We recently merged with them. They were our sister company. They do a lot of work on design strategies.

Now, the unit is probably about 200 people total across Charlotte, Denver, Atlanta, London, and New York. During COVID, we’ve been opportunistic about finding talent remotely, as most groups have as well. That really does, a full end-to-end life cycle around product, product innovation, design strategy, and design thinking. A lot of really fun work. That’s a little bit of background on me.

Paul

As part of GlobalLogic and Method, you do quite a bit of work in partnership with Oliver Wyman. Care to share a bit about that?

Jason

The Oliver Wyman partnership is very recent; we just started working together and launching a product together. And it’s been a really fun learning exercise. I find that we operate as one team really well.

So we’ve got two projects that we’re working on now across two different groups in financial services and banking. We’re getting ready to release a product together to the public in July, which, in this job, the design work is so much fun, but there is nothing more exciting than seeing working code. It’s just so rewarding to see all the thinking, all the strategy, all the long hours, the working code that a user can use — so really exciting.

Being able to quickly scale a team to launch a business together is a lot of fun, playing on a larger stage. Sometimes with clients, you only get to see the strategy or only get to see the design or only get to do the development, but really being able to go to the end-to-end, that’s the dream.

Paul

We always talk about things that are top of mind for leaders in the insurance industry, and how they can reinvent themselves and set themselves on the path to growth and success. I would love to start with design thinking, which is something that… I mean, everyone has a slightly different definition of it, a slightly different view of what it is and what it isn’t, so maybe let’s start there. Design thinking in 100 words or fewer by Jason Rome.

Jason

I always start with, what’s the dictionary say about it? When design thinking is defined on Wikipedia, it talks about the processes, ways of thinking, and principles for developing customer-centric ideas using design. A lot of people, when they think about design thinking, think about the double diamond, which is diverge and converge around what the problem we’re solving is, and then diverge and converge around solutions.

When I talk about design thinking, I like to use the analogy of going to the gym because it’s not something that you do once, and are done. Working out is not something you ever finish. Every time you go, you get a little bit stronger. And I think one of the problems with design thinking is that it gets treated as a box to be checked as part of a process. People are like, all right, I’ve designed thought, I’m innovative. It gets confused with the workshop with 40 people, with a bunch of stickies on the wall.

And really, at its core, design thinking is about a team working together and learning. There’s a quote, I forget from where, but it talks about a product release just being your least wrong iteration to that point. I think that’s what design thinking is all about. Every day you set out to learn, you set out to get a little bit better. And the tools and the processes, that toolkit’s going to continue to evolve. I think sometimes CX/design thinking — they’re seen as these new things, but it’s an iteration on techniques that marketing and psychology have been using for a long time to get to where they are.

Paul

Continuing to release afterwards is also a big mindset shift for incumbents because usually it’s, we launch, we’re done, onto the next one! Rather than, actually, no, we’re launching… we’re going to continue releasing and iterating. What are some tricks to get there faster in terms of adopting this design thinking internally within an incumbent?

Jason

I think it starts a lot with mindset, principles, and being comfortable with different ways of working.

Paul

Right.

Jason

The first part that’s always hard for people is being OK with being wrong and leaning into uncertainty and leaning into ambiguity. Because of certainty, I think sometimes… historically, in a more rigid, you might call it a waterfall, straightforward process… is at every milestone, everyone lines up around a decision, and it moves to the next stage.

In Agile or product work, it’s about getting better bit by bit, in increments. There’s an emotional side to it because once you have an idea — and this is all of us, no one’s immune to this — once you start working on something, you start to become proud of it. And being willing to always walk away from an idea because you get better data.

We talk about strong beliefs loosely held, which is the way I like to talk about it. It’s “be confident with what you’re doing, but always be willing to look past it.” And when we’re talking to clients, we talk about… In Agile, people are asking, well, who’s the decision-maker in Agile? Is it a product? Is it the business? Is it the engineer? And I always say, well, the user is the decision-maker. And decisions shouldn’t really matter in design thinking in Agile. You should be running and making so many small bets that nobody’s worried about making decisions because every time there’s a decision to be made, it’s designing a test to validate the right direction and be able to move forward. But even when you’re validating with a test and leaning into that uncertainty, you’re never going to have 100% certainty. There’s always going to be risk in what you’re doing.

Being comfortable with a decision being 70%, 80% certain and moving forward with it, that’s a really hard thing to overcome. People expect that we have all this data, we’re being data-driven. So that’s the first big thing, it’s leaning to that uncertainty.

I think the second thing for whether it’s design thinking, product, or Agile, is for organizations and leadership teams to start to see their role a little bit differently. In a traditional, straightforward process, leadership might set strategy once a year, and there’s a big planning cycle, and they set their goals for the year.

And leadership teams, especially when it comes to digital and product in those organizations, are used to paying for projects with expected forecasted outcomes. That doesn’t leave enough wiggle room for design thinking and Agile to always do their work. And so, organizations that are embracing this mindset get used to funding the teams and people, and get really smart around setting goals, whether it’s through OKRs or people using different customer experience metrics, something for that organization. They’re setting those goals and creating that vision, and then saying, hey, this is how we compete. These metrics are how we’re going to be different; this is how we compete. We’re going to give you guys the tools to do it, go forth and make it, and we’re going to support you and bounce that off you, but we’re not here to make decisions.

And I think a lot of times in large organizations, leadership and decision-making are synonymous. And with Agile, and product and design thinking, it’s the people that are closest to the customer that should be making that final decision, and leadership should be able to support that and fund those teams. But there’s a lot of change there. There’s a lot of discomfort, there’s a lot of trust in the organization. It requires really clear accountability.

A lot of organizations don’t have the analytic maturity to be able to measure things on that granular a scale and to have that work across it. So those are two of the big things. Learning to deal with uncertainty and move past it, being able to be wrong, and then being able to really focus on outcomes that orient towards the business, versus expecting deliverables and exact projects to happen. Adjusting that mindset is a really good foundational starting point.

Paul

Across financial services or beyond that, have you seen different types of incumbents being better suited to adopt this or to apply these best practices than others? Is it very much on a case-by-case basis for your experience?

Jason

It’s on a case-by-case basis. I think even in a single organization, sometimes for a financial services company, you might see the credit card line of business adopt this, while the personal lines and loans don’t. It’s highly variable within an organization. You do start to find these pockets of intrapreneur, as you might, who have this startup mindset.

The word “product” is very confusing when it comes to financial services and insurance. The example I like to use is, if you’re TurboTax or you’re Uber, your product only means one thing. Like, TurboTax is a product that people pay money for. If I own the underwriting experience at an insurance company or I own the customer portal at a bank, it doesn’t inherently make money on its own. Nobody pays $10 every time someone goes through the underwriting process. It facilitates the ability to make money through what the core product is, whether that be a credit card or an insurance policy.

So, going back to the OKRs, the metrics, and the leadership conversation, I think sometimes in companies, teams that are managing the digital experiences, the digital products get disconnected from the value that their product is creating for the business, because those clear metrics haven’t been set. They’ll run their design thinking playbook on their product, and they’ll come up with a lot of things customers want, but it might not be connected to the company's strategy. It might not be connected back to the differentiated value prop of a single bank or financial services institution.

In insurance, you might have three very different competitive strategies and target segments for your annuities product, versus your disability product, versus your life product, versus your employee benefits. If you have one team that’s trying to build the portal for all of those things and thinking about it, they need to understand the frequency customers are coming in, what percentage of people are calling in over the phone versus going digital versus chat. What are the nuances of those different products? What drives lifetime value to be able to translate meaningful experiences into that? It’s a tough balancing act.

Paul

And that’s a very interesting point, and there’s a lot in flux today around these things. And I agree with you, there’s also a lot of unique challenges. You were talking about regulation and everything, right? It’s a lot for incumbents to try to reconcile between their old jargon, if you will, and what product means in the new world, if you will.

Jason

And so I think insurance is in a really unique spot right now when it comes to human-centered design, because there’s this confluence of going digital, there’s this new expectation of how I interact with companies. And, if you combine that with the emotional side of insurance and risk.… And risk is an inherently really hard thing for people to wrap their heads around, especially risk when it comes to life insurance, when it comes to digital.

And then I think the third thing that’s really interesting when it comes to insurance is people’s changing relationships with their employers. You look at things like the gig economy, and you look at the rate at which people might switch. And does it change the value of a benefit? And I think for insurance to really innovate, it’s what the new risks people are taking on now, rather than what they used to. What are the risks in careers that people have now versus what they used to? And then how does digital servicing, and the lack of that representative and that sale, that personal relationship, remove the barriers to switching? How do I keep someone loyal when it’s not the insurance rep that I coach soccer with, our kids go to school together, we see each other every day? What sort of relationship do I, as a consumer, start to have with my insurance company? And how do we differentiate beyond that individual relationship, that sales experience?

Paul

Let’s build on that because you’re making a few very good points here. There are a couple of things, a couple of provocations I’d like to share with you, and we’d love your thoughts. The first one, which you touched on, is the old adage that, oftentimes, insurance is sold, not bought, right? You’re going to have an agent, you’re going to have someone that’s going to be advising you what to do, what to get. You’re not going to wake up one morning thinking, I need to get insurance, or I need to get this extra coverage and all these things. How do you actually set yourself up for success as an insurer? How do you design the right product, the right customer experience of the future?

Jason

I think the insurance salesman does this naturally already. They get referrals, they get warm leads, they get to know you, and they know your kid’s name. It was interesting, I was sitting around recently with some friends, and they were talking about, first, they were talking about HSAs and how those work, and they ended up on the topic of life insurance. I have a lot of friends who are new parents. And it was interesting seeing all the contrasting perspectives on whether they should have life insurance or not.

I think at the end of the day, what customers want is they want to feel safe, they want to be protected. The desire for my kids and my family to be OK if something happened to me is a universal need, but you’re going to have a lot of different perspectives on that. And understanding those segments and those personas means you can’t sell.

I had some folks, some friends in insurance, try to sell me once, and they came with a — I’m a very data-analytical person — and they came with the emotional sell to me of, well, what if something happened to you? Imagine us giving a check to your mom. And I was like, show me the percentages of something happening to me, and maybe I will buy from you.

Paul

Oh, so you were that guy?

Jason

I was that guy. What’s the risk for us with different types of disability insurance between an accident that would be catastrophic and result in a loss of life, versus an accident that would restrict our ability to work? I don’t think most people have a conceptualization of the likelihood of a short-term thing, versus a long-term thing, versus a life-ending thing in their own life. What’s the mental model that someone should be thinking about these different types of risks, and how they would pay for that?

I think insurance has to look at the money someone has in a bank. They have to look at your net worth, your existing assets, and what’s going to make sense to hedge that risk. A lot of people don’t have the mental model of thinking about their money and risk as a systems thinking of, all right, these types of risk I manage by keeping X money in the bank. These types of risk I really want to outsource to an insurer. And what are those risks I would like to outsource, because they would be so life-changing, so catastrophic that I would need that? And I think insurance companies need to understand those things that keep people up at night and think about that.

I’ll give you an example. Right now, I think one of the journeys that is going to define our generation is caring for the elderly and our parents. How do I hedge against the risk of having to quit my job or my partner having to quit their job and going to a single income, to having to care for a parent or having to put an add-on to our house to care for them? Who’s paying for that risk? How can I outsource that risk?

How do I outsource the risk of identity theft, and how should I think about the chances of identity theft and catastrophic versus simple identity theft? They’re very hard things to mentally wrap our heads around statistically. What are the chances of these events happening?

I think looking more at what the jobs to be done are for insurance. What are the risks that different types of people want to outsource? When I was talking to my friends, one person said, “As soon as I had a kid, I had insurance.” Another guy, same age, demographic, had a kid a year apart and said, “Well, nothing’s ever going to happen to me, so why would I need life insurance?” And then we talked to him, and it was like, “Well, how long would your family be OK without your salary?” And he was like, “OK, I’m going to get some life insurance.” Just that one question proposed to someone at the right time of getting them to look at their own scenario differently, and the things they care about can change that.

Paul

Obviously, we’ve been in a pandemic for over a year. We may be past the worst in the US, certainly not past the worst in other parts of the world. How have you seen this changing or requiring a change in the approach to design thinking, to rethinking customer experiences?

Jason

We’ve got a large utilities client that we do a lot of design thinking work for, and all of it was in person. It was intense two-week sessions. And when COVID started happening, they called us on Thursday and said, “Hey, we’re full remote next Monday.” And so, we had a day and the weekend to take everything our team did and put it into Miro and learn to facilitate.

The nice thing is, we’ve had a lot of really good practice doing things remotely and doing it over Miro. I’d say the results have been really good. We’ve seen really good engagement with it. We’ve made some changes.

One thing for me is leaning into the humanity each of us has. When we were talking to teams about how to facilitate design thinking in remote sessions, you had to lean into the fact that you’re not bringing in lunch for people. In fact, people are probably leaving their desks to go make lunch for their kids. So, don’t have a working lunch. Start at 10:00 and end at 3:00 so that parents can get their kids set up for remote schooling, and they can be there at the end of the day.

Sitting here in front of a screen, you don’t get to organically get up and take breaks. We went from being able to do six or eight-hour sessions to usually four or five hours in a day and be able to keep people, and respect their energy levels, and do that. I think we learned a little bit more about, from a human side, how much design thinking someone can take in a day, and be able to facilitate that remotely, and set some better boundaries.

Paul

I’m also interested to see how customer experiences and product features are going to evolve. We were talking about agents and all these things, even that entire world has had to change because, obviously, you couldn’t meet on the golf course anymore or you couldn’t meet in an office, and sit down together, and talk through things, right? You had to adjust to all these things, either through Zoom, through chat, through email, you name it.

The use of digital tools has boomed. How is it going to bounce back? What’s going to stay, what’s going to move? So interested in your thoughts, obviously. And also, how should incumbents in insurance and financial services, in particular, get most prepared for what’s to come?

Jason

One of the tenets of design thinking and Agile we talked about is letting people closest to the customers decide. With that comes this concept of autonomy and trust. I think sometimes people being in the office is a way of keeping an eye on people and making sure they’re working. Versus if you’re setting goals for teams and letting them figure out the work they need to do to get to that goal, you shouldn’t have to worry about if they’re working or not, because when it comes time, you’re going to be able to measure their performance.

Everyone had this fear of, oh, we’re all going remote. Are people just going to be sitting around playing video games all day instead? All the science has shown that people actually work a lot more.

I can’t guarantee what’s going to happen. I think my hope is that employers learn to lean in and empathize with their employees, and realize that people have different working styles, and they have different needs. I think respecting people’s needs, and how they work, and the fact that not everyone is an extrovert and wants to be able to work in an open floor plan and have small talk. And letting people lean into what works for them. Letting people lean into what works for their family, I think, is really important.

I’m hoping that’s what we see more of — employers learning to trust their employees. They get used to managing through the outcomes of people’s work, versus the amount of work and the activity of their work, and can empower people a little bit more.

Paul

And now for our signature final question. Any words of wisdom you’d like to leave our audience with?

Jason

One of the things I love to say when it comes to design thinking innovation is: We talk about falling in love with the problem and not the solution is a popular thing. I think falling in love with the right problem is what I always think about.

Customers have a lot of wants, and they have a lot of feedback. You can’t solve every problem, and knowing which problems are tied to business outcomes that are going to drive your competitive strategy, and focusing on that, I think, helps.

And then with that, we could do a whole other podcast on behavioral economics and psychology. But really designing for who people are and not who we think they are and embracing the humanity of that.

I think where design thinking goes wrong is, we have this model in our head of who we think people are. And if you look at financial services and insurance companies, and you look around the room at people who are designing those solutions, they’re not always representative of who the people are that they’re designed for. And so, finding a way to bring the customers into the room and really embrace who people are.

As people, we’re all emotional; there’s always a bit of mess with people. I think this speaks to the value of having a lot of diversity on your teams, because there are a lot of differences between people, and the way they view finance, and the way they think about money. Making sure that you’re embracing that and thinking about who people really are, and the way they think, and the way they make decisions, versus trying to think about the way you think about something and speaking your language to them is really important.

Paul

Thanks so much for this. It was great talking with you about design thinking, customer experience, and the new normal and what it entails, both from an experience and from a way of working, from a work-life balance standpoint.

Maybe speaking of work-life balance, you mentioned you play the piano. Have you picked up any new tunes or new types of music that you’ve been working on over the past few months on the piano?

Jason

A lot of Chopin and a lot of Beethoven is mainly what I’ve been doing.

Paul

Wow, terrific.

Jason

My nerdiest COVID hobby, though, has probably been relearning American history through reading the biography of every president. So that’s been my, I guess, forte.

Paul

Are you doing it by number? How are you taking it?

Jason

Chronologically.

Paul

Wow

Jason

I’m on Lincoln right now, so it’s a high point in things right now. I am less fun than I have ever been at dinner parties, though, and let me tell you why — it is not the topic that most people want to dive into.

Paul

That sounds very cool. We could probably do another podcast just about that for sure. Well, Jason, thanks so much for your time. That was incredibly fun and insightful talking to you. That was Jason Rome from Method. Thanks again, Jason. I’ll talk to you soon for sure.

Jason

Thanks, Paul.

Paul

For more information about our Reinventing Insurance series, make sure to visit our website at www.oliverwyman.com/reinventinginsurance. Thanks for listening, and I will talk to you next time.

This transcript has been edited for clarity.
 

Jason Rome is the senior vice president of digital strategy and customer experience at Method, a GlobalLogic company. With a background in product strategy and development, his career has centered on tackling complex business challenges through thoughtful design and innovation. Jason partners with clients to navigate uncertainty using human-centered design, helping them make meaningful progress while building the tools and mindsets needed for continued growth.

Oliver Wyman Partner and Head of Asia Pacific Insurance and Asset Management, Paul Ricard, is based in Singapore. Paul works closely with businesses to reinvent their strategies, products, and services and to fuel top-line growth opportunities. He works with clients across the Asia Pacific, as well as the Americas and Europe. He regularly partners with firms to reinvent their business strategy, rethink their priorities, and modernize their technology while accounting for rapidly changing customer needs. He understands his clients’ realities and thrives on helping them innovate and strengthen relationships with their customers while factoring in existing challenges.

Paul Ricard
Hi everyone, and welcome to Oliver Wyman’s Reinventing Insurance podcast. I’m your host, Paul Ricard. Today I’m talking to Jason Rome, who is a leader in digital strategy and customer experience at Method, which is the design arm of GlobalLogic. Welcome, Jason.

Jason Rome

Hey, great to be here.

Paul

Jason, why don’t we start with a brief intro? Tell us about yourself, your background, and who you work for.

Jason

Sure. I’ve been with the company for 10 years now, during a time when we rebranded Method, formerly the company I worked for, called Skookum, a bit of a mouthful. I joined Skookum as a product strategist back in 2015 and spent some time on the product side. And then for two  to three years, I was on the sales side of the business, mostly focused on financial services.

I’m based here in Charlotte, North Carolina, and so working in financial services comes with the territory a little bit. I broke off from the sales team a couple of years ago and started our digital strategy customer experience group. In terms of what that group does, it’s a bit of a mix. When we talk to customers, sometimes they talk about innovation, sometimes they talk about transformation, sometimes it’s design thinking, sometimes it’s Agile and product work. These days it might be dual-track Agile or continuous discovery. Really, it’s a lot of similar activities in terms of falling in love with problems, empathizing with our customers, and building really good customer-driven products.

And then, in terms of more recent company history, Skookum was acquired by GlobalLogic in 2019. GlobalLogic also owns a company called Method, based in New York, with a studio in London as well. We recently merged with them. They were our sister company. They do a lot of work on design strategies.

Now, the unit is probably about 200 people total across Charlotte, Denver, Atlanta, London, and New York. During COVID, we’ve been opportunistic about finding talent remotely, as most groups have as well. That really does, a full end-to-end life cycle around product, product innovation, design strategy, and design thinking. A lot of really fun work. That’s a little bit of background on me.

Paul

As part of GlobalLogic and Method, you do quite a bit of work in partnership with Oliver Wyman. Care to share a bit about that?

Jason

The Oliver Wyman partnership is very recent; we just started working together and launching a product together. And it’s been a really fun learning exercise. I find that we operate as one team really well.

So we’ve got two projects that we’re working on now across two different groups in financial services and banking. We’re getting ready to release a product together to the public in July, which, in this job, the design work is so much fun, but there is nothing more exciting than seeing working code. It’s just so rewarding to see all the thinking, all the strategy, all the long hours, the working code that a user can use — so really exciting.

Being able to quickly scale a team to launch a business together is a lot of fun, playing on a larger stage. Sometimes with clients, you only get to see the strategy or only get to see the design or only get to do the development, but really being able to go to the end-to-end, that’s the dream.

Paul

We always talk about things that are top of mind for leaders in the insurance industry, and how they can reinvent themselves and set themselves on the path to growth and success. I would love to start with design thinking, which is something that… I mean, everyone has a slightly different definition of it, a slightly different view of what it is and what it isn’t, so maybe let’s start there. Design thinking in 100 words or fewer by Jason Rome.

Jason

I always start with, what’s the dictionary say about it? When design thinking is defined on Wikipedia, it talks about the processes, ways of thinking, and principles for developing customer-centric ideas using design. A lot of people, when they think about design thinking, think about the double diamond, which is diverge and converge around what the problem we’re solving is, and then diverge and converge around solutions.

When I talk about design thinking, I like to use the analogy of going to the gym because it’s not something that you do once, and are done. Working out is not something you ever finish. Every time you go, you get a little bit stronger. And I think one of the problems with design thinking is that it gets treated as a box to be checked as part of a process. People are like, all right, I’ve designed thought, I’m innovative. It gets confused with the workshop with 40 people, with a bunch of stickies on the wall.

And really, at its core, design thinking is about a team working together and learning. There’s a quote, I forget from where, but it talks about a product release just being your least wrong iteration to that point. I think that’s what design thinking is all about. Every day you set out to learn, you set out to get a little bit better. And the tools and the processes, that toolkit’s going to continue to evolve. I think sometimes CX/design thinking — they’re seen as these new things, but it’s an iteration on techniques that marketing and psychology have been using for a long time to get to where they are.

Paul

Continuing to release afterwards is also a big mindset shift for incumbents because usually it’s, we launch, we’re done, onto the next one! Rather than, actually, no, we’re launching… we’re going to continue releasing and iterating. What are some tricks to get there faster in terms of adopting this design thinking internally within an incumbent?

Jason

I think it starts a lot with mindset, principles, and being comfortable with different ways of working.

Paul

Right.

Jason

The first part that’s always hard for people is being OK with being wrong and leaning into uncertainty and leaning into ambiguity. Because of certainty, I think sometimes… historically, in a more rigid, you might call it a waterfall, straightforward process… is at every milestone, everyone lines up around a decision, and it moves to the next stage.

In Agile or product work, it’s about getting better bit by bit, in increments. There’s an emotional side to it because once you have an idea — and this is all of us, no one’s immune to this — once you start working on something, you start to become proud of it. And being willing to always walk away from an idea because you get better data.

We talk about strong beliefs loosely held, which is the way I like to talk about it. It’s “be confident with what you’re doing, but always be willing to look past it.” And when we’re talking to clients, we talk about… In Agile, people are asking, well, who’s the decision-maker in Agile? Is it a product? Is it the business? Is it the engineer? And I always say, well, the user is the decision-maker. And decisions shouldn’t really matter in design thinking in Agile. You should be running and making so many small bets that nobody’s worried about making decisions because every time there’s a decision to be made, it’s designing a test to validate the right direction and be able to move forward. But even when you’re validating with a test and leaning into that uncertainty, you’re never going to have 100% certainty. There’s always going to be risk in what you’re doing.

Being comfortable with a decision being 70%, 80% certain and moving forward with it, that’s a really hard thing to overcome. People expect that we have all this data, we’re being data-driven. So that’s the first big thing, it’s leaning to that uncertainty.

I think the second thing for whether it’s design thinking, product, or Agile, is for organizations and leadership teams to start to see their role a little bit differently. In a traditional, straightforward process, leadership might set strategy once a year, and there’s a big planning cycle, and they set their goals for the year.

And leadership teams, especially when it comes to digital and product in those organizations, are used to paying for projects with expected forecasted outcomes. That doesn’t leave enough wiggle room for design thinking and Agile to always do their work. And so, organizations that are embracing this mindset get used to funding the teams and people, and get really smart around setting goals, whether it’s through OKRs or people using different customer experience metrics, something for that organization. They’re setting those goals and creating that vision, and then saying, hey, this is how we compete. These metrics are how we’re going to be different; this is how we compete. We’re going to give you guys the tools to do it, go forth and make it, and we’re going to support you and bounce that off you, but we’re not here to make decisions.

And I think a lot of times in large organizations, leadership and decision-making are synonymous. And with Agile, and product and design thinking, it’s the people that are closest to the customer that should be making that final decision, and leadership should be able to support that and fund those teams. But there’s a lot of change there. There’s a lot of discomfort, there’s a lot of trust in the organization. It requires really clear accountability.

A lot of organizations don’t have the analytic maturity to be able to measure things on that granular a scale and to have that work across it. So those are two of the big things. Learning to deal with uncertainty and move past it, being able to be wrong, and then being able to really focus on outcomes that orient towards the business, versus expecting deliverables and exact projects to happen. Adjusting that mindset is a really good foundational starting point.

Paul

Across financial services or beyond that, have you seen different types of incumbents being better suited to adopt this or to apply these best practices than others? Is it very much on a case-by-case basis for your experience?

Jason

It’s on a case-by-case basis. I think even in a single organization, sometimes for a financial services company, you might see the credit card line of business adopt this, while the personal lines and loans don’t. It’s highly variable within an organization. You do start to find these pockets of intrapreneur, as you might, who have this startup mindset.

The word “product” is very confusing when it comes to financial services and insurance. The example I like to use is, if you’re TurboTax or you’re Uber, your product only means one thing. Like, TurboTax is a product that people pay money for. If I own the underwriting experience at an insurance company or I own the customer portal at a bank, it doesn’t inherently make money on its own. Nobody pays $10 every time someone goes through the underwriting process. It facilitates the ability to make money through what the core product is, whether that be a credit card or an insurance policy.

So, going back to the OKRs, the metrics, and the leadership conversation, I think sometimes in companies, teams that are managing the digital experiences, the digital products get disconnected from the value that their product is creating for the business, because those clear metrics haven’t been set. They’ll run their design thinking playbook on their product, and they’ll come up with a lot of things customers want, but it might not be connected to the company's strategy. It might not be connected back to the differentiated value prop of a single bank or financial services institution.

In insurance, you might have three very different competitive strategies and target segments for your annuities product, versus your disability product, versus your life product, versus your employee benefits. If you have one team that’s trying to build the portal for all of those things and thinking about it, they need to understand the frequency customers are coming in, what percentage of people are calling in over the phone versus going digital versus chat. What are the nuances of those different products? What drives lifetime value to be able to translate meaningful experiences into that? It’s a tough balancing act.

Paul

And that’s a very interesting point, and there’s a lot in flux today around these things. And I agree with you, there’s also a lot of unique challenges. You were talking about regulation and everything, right? It’s a lot for incumbents to try to reconcile between their old jargon, if you will, and what product means in the new world, if you will.

Jason

And so I think insurance is in a really unique spot right now when it comes to human-centered design, because there’s this confluence of going digital, there’s this new expectation of how I interact with companies. And, if you combine that with the emotional side of insurance and risk.… And risk is an inherently really hard thing for people to wrap their heads around, especially risk when it comes to life insurance, when it comes to digital.

And then I think the third thing that’s really interesting when it comes to insurance is people’s changing relationships with their employers. You look at things like the gig economy, and you look at the rate at which people might switch. And does it change the value of a benefit? And I think for insurance to really innovate, it’s what the new risks people are taking on now, rather than what they used to. What are the risks in careers that people have now versus what they used to? And then how does digital servicing, and the lack of that representative and that sale, that personal relationship, remove the barriers to switching? How do I keep someone loyal when it’s not the insurance rep that I coach soccer with, our kids go to school together, we see each other every day? What sort of relationship do I, as a consumer, start to have with my insurance company? And how do we differentiate beyond that individual relationship, that sales experience?

Paul

Let’s build on that because you’re making a few very good points here. There are a couple of things, a couple of provocations I’d like to share with you, and we’d love your thoughts. The first one, which you touched on, is the old adage that, oftentimes, insurance is sold, not bought, right? You’re going to have an agent, you’re going to have someone that’s going to be advising you what to do, what to get. You’re not going to wake up one morning thinking, I need to get insurance, or I need to get this extra coverage and all these things. How do you actually set yourself up for success as an insurer? How do you design the right product, the right customer experience of the future?

Jason

I think the insurance salesman does this naturally already. They get referrals, they get warm leads, they get to know you, and they know your kid’s name. It was interesting, I was sitting around recently with some friends, and they were talking about, first, they were talking about HSAs and how those work, and they ended up on the topic of life insurance. I have a lot of friends who are new parents. And it was interesting seeing all the contrasting perspectives on whether they should have life insurance or not.

I think at the end of the day, what customers want is they want to feel safe, they want to be protected. The desire for my kids and my family to be OK if something happened to me is a universal need, but you’re going to have a lot of different perspectives on that. And understanding those segments and those personas means you can’t sell.

I had some folks, some friends in insurance, try to sell me once, and they came with a — I’m a very data-analytical person — and they came with the emotional sell to me of, well, what if something happened to you? Imagine us giving a check to your mom. And I was like, show me the percentages of something happening to me, and maybe I will buy from you.

Paul

Oh, so you were that guy?

Jason

I was that guy. What’s the risk for us with different types of disability insurance between an accident that would be catastrophic and result in a loss of life, versus an accident that would restrict our ability to work? I don’t think most people have a conceptualization of the likelihood of a short-term thing, versus a long-term thing, versus a life-ending thing in their own life. What’s the mental model that someone should be thinking about these different types of risks, and how they would pay for that?

I think insurance has to look at the money someone has in a bank. They have to look at your net worth, your existing assets, and what’s going to make sense to hedge that risk. A lot of people don’t have the mental model of thinking about their money and risk as a systems thinking of, all right, these types of risk I manage by keeping X money in the bank. These types of risk I really want to outsource to an insurer. And what are those risks I would like to outsource, because they would be so life-changing, so catastrophic that I would need that? And I think insurance companies need to understand those things that keep people up at night and think about that.

I’ll give you an example. Right now, I think one of the journeys that is going to define our generation is caring for the elderly and our parents. How do I hedge against the risk of having to quit my job or my partner having to quit their job and going to a single income, to having to care for a parent or having to put an add-on to our house to care for them? Who’s paying for that risk? How can I outsource that risk?

How do I outsource the risk of identity theft, and how should I think about the chances of identity theft and catastrophic versus simple identity theft? They’re very hard things to mentally wrap our heads around statistically. What are the chances of these events happening?

I think looking more at what the jobs to be done are for insurance. What are the risks that different types of people want to outsource? When I was talking to my friends, one person said, “As soon as I had a kid, I had insurance.” Another guy, same age, demographic, had a kid a year apart and said, “Well, nothing’s ever going to happen to me, so why would I need life insurance?” And then we talked to him, and it was like, “Well, how long would your family be OK without your salary?” And he was like, “OK, I’m going to get some life insurance.” Just that one question proposed to someone at the right time of getting them to look at their own scenario differently, and the things they care about can change that.

Paul

Obviously, we’ve been in a pandemic for over a year. We may be past the worst in the US, certainly not past the worst in other parts of the world. How have you seen this changing or requiring a change in the approach to design thinking, to rethinking customer experiences?

Jason

We’ve got a large utilities client that we do a lot of design thinking work for, and all of it was in person. It was intense two-week sessions. And when COVID started happening, they called us on Thursday and said, “Hey, we’re full remote next Monday.” And so, we had a day and the weekend to take everything our team did and put it into Miro and learn to facilitate.

The nice thing is, we’ve had a lot of really good practice doing things remotely and doing it over Miro. I’d say the results have been really good. We’ve seen really good engagement with it. We’ve made some changes.

One thing for me is leaning into the humanity each of us has. When we were talking to teams about how to facilitate design thinking in remote sessions, you had to lean into the fact that you’re not bringing in lunch for people. In fact, people are probably leaving their desks to go make lunch for their kids. So, don’t have a working lunch. Start at 10:00 and end at 3:00 so that parents can get their kids set up for remote schooling, and they can be there at the end of the day.

Sitting here in front of a screen, you don’t get to organically get up and take breaks. We went from being able to do six or eight-hour sessions to usually four or five hours in a day and be able to keep people, and respect their energy levels, and do that. I think we learned a little bit more about, from a human side, how much design thinking someone can take in a day, and be able to facilitate that remotely, and set some better boundaries.

Paul

I’m also interested to see how customer experiences and product features are going to evolve. We were talking about agents and all these things, even that entire world has had to change because, obviously, you couldn’t meet on the golf course anymore or you couldn’t meet in an office, and sit down together, and talk through things, right? You had to adjust to all these things, either through Zoom, through chat, through email, you name it.

The use of digital tools has boomed. How is it going to bounce back? What’s going to stay, what’s going to move? So interested in your thoughts, obviously. And also, how should incumbents in insurance and financial services, in particular, get most prepared for what’s to come?

Jason

One of the tenets of design thinking and Agile we talked about is letting people closest to the customers decide. With that comes this concept of autonomy and trust. I think sometimes people being in the office is a way of keeping an eye on people and making sure they’re working. Versus if you’re setting goals for teams and letting them figure out the work they need to do to get to that goal, you shouldn’t have to worry about if they’re working or not, because when it comes time, you’re going to be able to measure their performance.

Everyone had this fear of, oh, we’re all going remote. Are people just going to be sitting around playing video games all day instead? All the science has shown that people actually work a lot more.

I can’t guarantee what’s going to happen. I think my hope is that employers learn to lean in and empathize with their employees, and realize that people have different working styles, and they have different needs. I think respecting people’s needs, and how they work, and the fact that not everyone is an extrovert and wants to be able to work in an open floor plan and have small talk. And letting people lean into what works for them. Letting people lean into what works for their family, I think, is really important.

I’m hoping that’s what we see more of — employers learning to trust their employees. They get used to managing through the outcomes of people’s work, versus the amount of work and the activity of their work, and can empower people a little bit more.

Paul

And now for our signature final question. Any words of wisdom you’d like to leave our audience with?

Jason

One of the things I love to say when it comes to design thinking innovation is: We talk about falling in love with the problem and not the solution is a popular thing. I think falling in love with the right problem is what I always think about.

Customers have a lot of wants, and they have a lot of feedback. You can’t solve every problem, and knowing which problems are tied to business outcomes that are going to drive your competitive strategy, and focusing on that, I think, helps.

And then with that, we could do a whole other podcast on behavioral economics and psychology. But really designing for who people are and not who we think they are and embracing the humanity of that.

I think where design thinking goes wrong is, we have this model in our head of who we think people are. And if you look at financial services and insurance companies, and you look around the room at people who are designing those solutions, they’re not always representative of who the people are that they’re designed for. And so, finding a way to bring the customers into the room and really embrace who people are.

As people, we’re all emotional; there’s always a bit of mess with people. I think this speaks to the value of having a lot of diversity on your teams, because there are a lot of differences between people, and the way they view finance, and the way they think about money. Making sure that you’re embracing that and thinking about who people really are, and the way they think, and the way they make decisions, versus trying to think about the way you think about something and speaking your language to them is really important.

Paul

Thanks so much for this. It was great talking with you about design thinking, customer experience, and the new normal and what it entails, both from an experience and from a way of working, from a work-life balance standpoint.

Maybe speaking of work-life balance, you mentioned you play the piano. Have you picked up any new tunes or new types of music that you’ve been working on over the past few months on the piano?

Jason

A lot of Chopin and a lot of Beethoven is mainly what I’ve been doing.

Paul

Wow, terrific.

Jason

My nerdiest COVID hobby, though, has probably been relearning American history through reading the biography of every president. So that’s been my, I guess, forte.

Paul

Are you doing it by number? How are you taking it?

Jason

Chronologically.

Paul

Wow

Jason

I’m on Lincoln right now, so it’s a high point in things right now. I am less fun than I have ever been at dinner parties, though, and let me tell you why — it is not the topic that most people want to dive into.

Paul

That sounds very cool. We could probably do another podcast just about that for sure. Well, Jason, thanks so much for your time. That was incredibly fun and insightful talking to you. That was Jason Rome from Method. Thanks again, Jason. I’ll talk to you soon for sure.

Jason

Thanks, Paul.

Paul

For more information about our Reinventing Insurance series, make sure to visit our website at www.oliverwyman.com/reinventinginsurance. Thanks for listening, and I will talk to you next time.

This transcript has been edited for clarity.
 

Jason Rome is the senior vice president of digital strategy and customer experience at Method, a GlobalLogic company. With a background in product strategy and development, his career has centered on tackling complex business challenges through thoughtful design and innovation. Jason partners with clients to navigate uncertainty using human-centered design, helping them make meaningful progress while building the tools and mindsets needed for continued growth.

Oliver Wyman Partner and Head of Asia Pacific Insurance and Asset Management, Paul Ricard, is based in Singapore. Paul works closely with businesses to reinvent their strategies, products, and services and to fuel top-line growth opportunities. He works with clients across the Asia Pacific, as well as the Americas and Europe. He regularly partners with firms to reinvent their business strategy, rethink their priorities, and modernize their technology while accounting for rapidly changing customer needs. He understands his clients’ realities and thrives on helping them innovate and strengthen relationships with their customers while factoring in existing challenges.

Paul Ricard
Hi everyone, and welcome to Oliver Wyman’s Reinventing Insurance podcast. I’m your host, Paul Ricard. Today I’m talking to Jason Rome, who is a leader in digital strategy and customer experience at Method, which is the design arm of GlobalLogic. Welcome, Jason.

Jason Rome

Hey, great to be here.

Paul

Jason, why don’t we start with a brief intro? Tell us about yourself, your background, and who you work for.

Jason

Sure. I’ve been with the company for 10 years now, during a time when we rebranded Method, formerly the company I worked for, called Skookum, a bit of a mouthful. I joined Skookum as a product strategist back in 2015 and spent some time on the product side. And then for two  to three years, I was on the sales side of the business, mostly focused on financial services.

I’m based here in Charlotte, North Carolina, and so working in financial services comes with the territory a little bit. I broke off from the sales team a couple of years ago and started our digital strategy customer experience group. In terms of what that group does, it’s a bit of a mix. When we talk to customers, sometimes they talk about innovation, sometimes they talk about transformation, sometimes it’s design thinking, sometimes it’s Agile and product work. These days it might be dual-track Agile or continuous discovery. Really, it’s a lot of similar activities in terms of falling in love with problems, empathizing with our customers, and building really good customer-driven products.

And then, in terms of more recent company history, Skookum was acquired by GlobalLogic in 2019. GlobalLogic also owns a company called Method, based in New York, with a studio in London as well. We recently merged with them. They were our sister company. They do a lot of work on design strategies.

Now, the unit is probably about 200 people total across Charlotte, Denver, Atlanta, London, and New York. During COVID, we’ve been opportunistic about finding talent remotely, as most groups have as well. That really does, a full end-to-end life cycle around product, product innovation, design strategy, and design thinking. A lot of really fun work. That’s a little bit of background on me.

Paul

As part of GlobalLogic and Method, you do quite a bit of work in partnership with Oliver Wyman. Care to share a bit about that?

Jason

The Oliver Wyman partnership is very recent; we just started working together and launching a product together. And it’s been a really fun learning exercise. I find that we operate as one team really well.

So we’ve got two projects that we’re working on now across two different groups in financial services and banking. We’re getting ready to release a product together to the public in July, which, in this job, the design work is so much fun, but there is nothing more exciting than seeing working code. It’s just so rewarding to see all the thinking, all the strategy, all the long hours, the working code that a user can use — so really exciting.

Being able to quickly scale a team to launch a business together is a lot of fun, playing on a larger stage. Sometimes with clients, you only get to see the strategy or only get to see the design or only get to do the development, but really being able to go to the end-to-end, that’s the dream.

Paul

We always talk about things that are top of mind for leaders in the insurance industry, and how they can reinvent themselves and set themselves on the path to growth and success. I would love to start with design thinking, which is something that… I mean, everyone has a slightly different definition of it, a slightly different view of what it is and what it isn’t, so maybe let’s start there. Design thinking in 100 words or fewer by Jason Rome.

Jason

I always start with, what’s the dictionary say about it? When design thinking is defined on Wikipedia, it talks about the processes, ways of thinking, and principles for developing customer-centric ideas using design. A lot of people, when they think about design thinking, think about the double diamond, which is diverge and converge around what the problem we’re solving is, and then diverge and converge around solutions.

When I talk about design thinking, I like to use the analogy of going to the gym because it’s not something that you do once, and are done. Working out is not something you ever finish. Every time you go, you get a little bit stronger. And I think one of the problems with design thinking is that it gets treated as a box to be checked as part of a process. People are like, all right, I’ve designed thought, I’m innovative. It gets confused with the workshop with 40 people, with a bunch of stickies on the wall.

And really, at its core, design thinking is about a team working together and learning. There’s a quote, I forget from where, but it talks about a product release just being your least wrong iteration to that point. I think that’s what design thinking is all about. Every day you set out to learn, you set out to get a little bit better. And the tools and the processes, that toolkit’s going to continue to evolve. I think sometimes CX/design thinking — they’re seen as these new things, but it’s an iteration on techniques that marketing and psychology have been using for a long time to get to where they are.

Paul

Continuing to release afterwards is also a big mindset shift for incumbents because usually it’s, we launch, we’re done, onto the next one! Rather than, actually, no, we’re launching… we’re going to continue releasing and iterating. What are some tricks to get there faster in terms of adopting this design thinking internally within an incumbent?

Jason

I think it starts a lot with mindset, principles, and being comfortable with different ways of working.

Paul

Right.

Jason

The first part that’s always hard for people is being OK with being wrong and leaning into uncertainty and leaning into ambiguity. Because of certainty, I think sometimes… historically, in a more rigid, you might call it a waterfall, straightforward process… is at every milestone, everyone lines up around a decision, and it moves to the next stage.

In Agile or product work, it’s about getting better bit by bit, in increments. There’s an emotional side to it because once you have an idea — and this is all of us, no one’s immune to this — once you start working on something, you start to become proud of it. And being willing to always walk away from an idea because you get better data.

We talk about strong beliefs loosely held, which is the way I like to talk about it. It’s “be confident with what you’re doing, but always be willing to look past it.” And when we’re talking to clients, we talk about… In Agile, people are asking, well, who’s the decision-maker in Agile? Is it a product? Is it the business? Is it the engineer? And I always say, well, the user is the decision-maker. And decisions shouldn’t really matter in design thinking in Agile. You should be running and making so many small bets that nobody’s worried about making decisions because every time there’s a decision to be made, it’s designing a test to validate the right direction and be able to move forward. But even when you’re validating with a test and leaning into that uncertainty, you’re never going to have 100% certainty. There’s always going to be risk in what you’re doing.

Being comfortable with a decision being 70%, 80% certain and moving forward with it, that’s a really hard thing to overcome. People expect that we have all this data, we’re being data-driven. So that’s the first big thing, it’s leaning to that uncertainty.

I think the second thing for whether it’s design thinking, product, or Agile, is for organizations and leadership teams to start to see their role a little bit differently. In a traditional, straightforward process, leadership might set strategy once a year, and there’s a big planning cycle, and they set their goals for the year.

And leadership teams, especially when it comes to digital and product in those organizations, are used to paying for projects with expected forecasted outcomes. That doesn’t leave enough wiggle room for design thinking and Agile to always do their work. And so, organizations that are embracing this mindset get used to funding the teams and people, and get really smart around setting goals, whether it’s through OKRs or people using different customer experience metrics, something for that organization. They’re setting those goals and creating that vision, and then saying, hey, this is how we compete. These metrics are how we’re going to be different; this is how we compete. We’re going to give you guys the tools to do it, go forth and make it, and we’re going to support you and bounce that off you, but we’re not here to make decisions.

And I think a lot of times in large organizations, leadership and decision-making are synonymous. And with Agile, and product and design thinking, it’s the people that are closest to the customer that should be making that final decision, and leadership should be able to support that and fund those teams. But there’s a lot of change there. There’s a lot of discomfort, there’s a lot of trust in the organization. It requires really clear accountability.

A lot of organizations don’t have the analytic maturity to be able to measure things on that granular a scale and to have that work across it. So those are two of the big things. Learning to deal with uncertainty and move past it, being able to be wrong, and then being able to really focus on outcomes that orient towards the business, versus expecting deliverables and exact projects to happen. Adjusting that mindset is a really good foundational starting point.

Paul

Across financial services or beyond that, have you seen different types of incumbents being better suited to adopt this or to apply these best practices than others? Is it very much on a case-by-case basis for your experience?

Jason

It’s on a case-by-case basis. I think even in a single organization, sometimes for a financial services company, you might see the credit card line of business adopt this, while the personal lines and loans don’t. It’s highly variable within an organization. You do start to find these pockets of intrapreneur, as you might, who have this startup mindset.

The word “product” is very confusing when it comes to financial services and insurance. The example I like to use is, if you’re TurboTax or you’re Uber, your product only means one thing. Like, TurboTax is a product that people pay money for. If I own the underwriting experience at an insurance company or I own the customer portal at a bank, it doesn’t inherently make money on its own. Nobody pays $10 every time someone goes through the underwriting process. It facilitates the ability to make money through what the core product is, whether that be a credit card or an insurance policy.

So, going back to the OKRs, the metrics, and the leadership conversation, I think sometimes in companies, teams that are managing the digital experiences, the digital products get disconnected from the value that their product is creating for the business, because those clear metrics haven’t been set. They’ll run their design thinking playbook on their product, and they’ll come up with a lot of things customers want, but it might not be connected to the company's strategy. It might not be connected back to the differentiated value prop of a single bank or financial services institution.

In insurance, you might have three very different competitive strategies and target segments for your annuities product, versus your disability product, versus your life product, versus your employee benefits. If you have one team that’s trying to build the portal for all of those things and thinking about it, they need to understand the frequency customers are coming in, what percentage of people are calling in over the phone versus going digital versus chat. What are the nuances of those different products? What drives lifetime value to be able to translate meaningful experiences into that? It’s a tough balancing act.

Paul

And that’s a very interesting point, and there’s a lot in flux today around these things. And I agree with you, there’s also a lot of unique challenges. You were talking about regulation and everything, right? It’s a lot for incumbents to try to reconcile between their old jargon, if you will, and what product means in the new world, if you will.

Jason

And so I think insurance is in a really unique spot right now when it comes to human-centered design, because there’s this confluence of going digital, there’s this new expectation of how I interact with companies. And, if you combine that with the emotional side of insurance and risk.… And risk is an inherently really hard thing for people to wrap their heads around, especially risk when it comes to life insurance, when it comes to digital.

And then I think the third thing that’s really interesting when it comes to insurance is people’s changing relationships with their employers. You look at things like the gig economy, and you look at the rate at which people might switch. And does it change the value of a benefit? And I think for insurance to really innovate, it’s what the new risks people are taking on now, rather than what they used to. What are the risks in careers that people have now versus what they used to? And then how does digital servicing, and the lack of that representative and that sale, that personal relationship, remove the barriers to switching? How do I keep someone loyal when it’s not the insurance rep that I coach soccer with, our kids go to school together, we see each other every day? What sort of relationship do I, as a consumer, start to have with my insurance company? And how do we differentiate beyond that individual relationship, that sales experience?

Paul

Let’s build on that because you’re making a few very good points here. There are a couple of things, a couple of provocations I’d like to share with you, and we’d love your thoughts. The first one, which you touched on, is the old adage that, oftentimes, insurance is sold, not bought, right? You’re going to have an agent, you’re going to have someone that’s going to be advising you what to do, what to get. You’re not going to wake up one morning thinking, I need to get insurance, or I need to get this extra coverage and all these things. How do you actually set yourself up for success as an insurer? How do you design the right product, the right customer experience of the future?

Jason

I think the insurance salesman does this naturally already. They get referrals, they get warm leads, they get to know you, and they know your kid’s name. It was interesting, I was sitting around recently with some friends, and they were talking about, first, they were talking about HSAs and how those work, and they ended up on the topic of life insurance. I have a lot of friends who are new parents. And it was interesting seeing all the contrasting perspectives on whether they should have life insurance or not.

I think at the end of the day, what customers want is they want to feel safe, they want to be protected. The desire for my kids and my family to be OK if something happened to me is a universal need, but you’re going to have a lot of different perspectives on that. And understanding those segments and those personas means you can’t sell.

I had some folks, some friends in insurance, try to sell me once, and they came with a — I’m a very data-analytical person — and they came with the emotional sell to me of, well, what if something happened to you? Imagine us giving a check to your mom. And I was like, show me the percentages of something happening to me, and maybe I will buy from you.

Paul

Oh, so you were that guy?

Jason

I was that guy. What’s the risk for us with different types of disability insurance between an accident that would be catastrophic and result in a loss of life, versus an accident that would restrict our ability to work? I don’t think most people have a conceptualization of the likelihood of a short-term thing, versus a long-term thing, versus a life-ending thing in their own life. What’s the mental model that someone should be thinking about these different types of risks, and how they would pay for that?

I think insurance has to look at the money someone has in a bank. They have to look at your net worth, your existing assets, and what’s going to make sense to hedge that risk. A lot of people don’t have the mental model of thinking about their money and risk as a systems thinking of, all right, these types of risk I manage by keeping X money in the bank. These types of risk I really want to outsource to an insurer. And what are those risks I would like to outsource, because they would be so life-changing, so catastrophic that I would need that? And I think insurance companies need to understand those things that keep people up at night and think about that.

I’ll give you an example. Right now, I think one of the journeys that is going to define our generation is caring for the elderly and our parents. How do I hedge against the risk of having to quit my job or my partner having to quit their job and going to a single income, to having to care for a parent or having to put an add-on to our house to care for them? Who’s paying for that risk? How can I outsource that risk?

How do I outsource the risk of identity theft, and how should I think about the chances of identity theft and catastrophic versus simple identity theft? They’re very hard things to mentally wrap our heads around statistically. What are the chances of these events happening?

I think looking more at what the jobs to be done are for insurance. What are the risks that different types of people want to outsource? When I was talking to my friends, one person said, “As soon as I had a kid, I had insurance.” Another guy, same age, demographic, had a kid a year apart and said, “Well, nothing’s ever going to happen to me, so why would I need life insurance?” And then we talked to him, and it was like, “Well, how long would your family be OK without your salary?” And he was like, “OK, I’m going to get some life insurance.” Just that one question proposed to someone at the right time of getting them to look at their own scenario differently, and the things they care about can change that.

Paul

Obviously, we’ve been in a pandemic for over a year. We may be past the worst in the US, certainly not past the worst in other parts of the world. How have you seen this changing or requiring a change in the approach to design thinking, to rethinking customer experiences?

Jason

We’ve got a large utilities client that we do a lot of design thinking work for, and all of it was in person. It was intense two-week sessions. And when COVID started happening, they called us on Thursday and said, “Hey, we’re full remote next Monday.” And so, we had a day and the weekend to take everything our team did and put it into Miro and learn to facilitate.

The nice thing is, we’ve had a lot of really good practice doing things remotely and doing it over Miro. I’d say the results have been really good. We’ve seen really good engagement with it. We’ve made some changes.

One thing for me is leaning into the humanity each of us has. When we were talking to teams about how to facilitate design thinking in remote sessions, you had to lean into the fact that you’re not bringing in lunch for people. In fact, people are probably leaving their desks to go make lunch for their kids. So, don’t have a working lunch. Start at 10:00 and end at 3:00 so that parents can get their kids set up for remote schooling, and they can be there at the end of the day.

Sitting here in front of a screen, you don’t get to organically get up and take breaks. We went from being able to do six or eight-hour sessions to usually four or five hours in a day and be able to keep people, and respect their energy levels, and do that. I think we learned a little bit more about, from a human side, how much design thinking someone can take in a day, and be able to facilitate that remotely, and set some better boundaries.

Paul

I’m also interested to see how customer experiences and product features are going to evolve. We were talking about agents and all these things, even that entire world has had to change because, obviously, you couldn’t meet on the golf course anymore or you couldn’t meet in an office, and sit down together, and talk through things, right? You had to adjust to all these things, either through Zoom, through chat, through email, you name it.

The use of digital tools has boomed. How is it going to bounce back? What’s going to stay, what’s going to move? So interested in your thoughts, obviously. And also, how should incumbents in insurance and financial services, in particular, get most prepared for what’s to come?

Jason

One of the tenets of design thinking and Agile we talked about is letting people closest to the customers decide. With that comes this concept of autonomy and trust. I think sometimes people being in the office is a way of keeping an eye on people and making sure they’re working. Versus if you’re setting goals for teams and letting them figure out the work they need to do to get to that goal, you shouldn’t have to worry about if they’re working or not, because when it comes time, you’re going to be able to measure their performance.

Everyone had this fear of, oh, we’re all going remote. Are people just going to be sitting around playing video games all day instead? All the science has shown that people actually work a lot more.

I can’t guarantee what’s going to happen. I think my hope is that employers learn to lean in and empathize with their employees, and realize that people have different working styles, and they have different needs. I think respecting people’s needs, and how they work, and the fact that not everyone is an extrovert and wants to be able to work in an open floor plan and have small talk. And letting people lean into what works for them. Letting people lean into what works for their family, I think, is really important.

I’m hoping that’s what we see more of — employers learning to trust their employees. They get used to managing through the outcomes of people’s work, versus the amount of work and the activity of their work, and can empower people a little bit more.

Paul

And now for our signature final question. Any words of wisdom you’d like to leave our audience with?

Jason

One of the things I love to say when it comes to design thinking innovation is: We talk about falling in love with the problem and not the solution is a popular thing. I think falling in love with the right problem is what I always think about.

Customers have a lot of wants, and they have a lot of feedback. You can’t solve every problem, and knowing which problems are tied to business outcomes that are going to drive your competitive strategy, and focusing on that, I think, helps.

And then with that, we could do a whole other podcast on behavioral economics and psychology. But really designing for who people are and not who we think they are and embracing the humanity of that.

I think where design thinking goes wrong is, we have this model in our head of who we think people are. And if you look at financial services and insurance companies, and you look around the room at people who are designing those solutions, they’re not always representative of who the people are that they’re designed for. And so, finding a way to bring the customers into the room and really embrace who people are.

As people, we’re all emotional; there’s always a bit of mess with people. I think this speaks to the value of having a lot of diversity on your teams, because there are a lot of differences between people, and the way they view finance, and the way they think about money. Making sure that you’re embracing that and thinking about who people really are, and the way they think, and the way they make decisions, versus trying to think about the way you think about something and speaking your language to them is really important.

Paul

Thanks so much for this. It was great talking with you about design thinking, customer experience, and the new normal and what it entails, both from an experience and from a way of working, from a work-life balance standpoint.

Maybe speaking of work-life balance, you mentioned you play the piano. Have you picked up any new tunes or new types of music that you’ve been working on over the past few months on the piano?

Jason

A lot of Chopin and a lot of Beethoven is mainly what I’ve been doing.

Paul

Wow, terrific.

Jason

My nerdiest COVID hobby, though, has probably been relearning American history through reading the biography of every president. So that’s been my, I guess, forte.

Paul

Are you doing it by number? How are you taking it?

Jason

Chronologically.

Paul

Wow

Jason

I’m on Lincoln right now, so it’s a high point in things right now. I am less fun than I have ever been at dinner parties, though, and let me tell you why — it is not the topic that most people want to dive into.

Paul

That sounds very cool. We could probably do another podcast just about that for sure. Well, Jason, thanks so much for your time. That was incredibly fun and insightful talking to you. That was Jason Rome from Method. Thanks again, Jason. I’ll talk to you soon for sure.

Jason

Thanks, Paul.

Paul

For more information about our Reinventing Insurance series, make sure to visit our website at www.oliverwyman.com/reinventinginsurance. Thanks for listening, and I will talk to you next time.

This transcript has been edited for clarity.
 

Jason Rome is the senior vice president of digital strategy and customer experience at Method, a GlobalLogic company. With a background in product strategy and development, his career has centered on tackling complex business challenges through thoughtful design and innovation. Jason partners with clients to navigate uncertainty using human-centered design, helping them make meaningful progress while building the tools and mindsets needed for continued growth.

Oliver Wyman Partner and Head of Asia Pacific Insurance and Asset Management, Paul Ricard, is based in Singapore. Paul works closely with businesses to reinvent their strategies, products, and services and to fuel top-line growth opportunities. He works with clients across the Asia Pacific, as well as the Americas and Europe. He regularly partners with firms to reinvent their business strategy, rethink their priorities, and modernize their technology while accounting for rapidly changing customer needs. He understands his clients’ realities and thrives on helping them innovate and strengthen relationships with their customers while factoring in existing challenges.