Bristling with Adaptive Capacity

 

One of my favorite leadership books is Geeks and Geezers, by Warren G. Bennis and Robert J. Thomas, in part because the book introduced the notion of "adaptive capacity" in leaders:

... adaptive capacity is applied creativity. It is the ability to look at a problem or crisis and see an array of unconventional solutions.

According to Bennis and Thomas, adaptive capacity permits individuals to:

...confront unfamiliar situations with confidence and optimism. Those with well developed adaptive capacity are not paralyzed by fear or undermined by anxiety in difficult situations. They believe that if they leap, a net will appear--or, if it doesn't, they will be able to find or fashion one in time. Where others see only chaos and confusion, they see opportunity.

If you are in the insurance business, you know that good claims leaders absolutely bristle with adaptive capacity. Flexibility and resiliency are requisites for managing claims, and successful claims leaders find meaning and strength by grappling with the adversity and uncertainty they face every day. The best claims leaders also have the confidence and the will to get personally involved in contentious and difficult situations and creatively move them toward successful resolution. They embrace challenges, overcome obstacles, and learn and grow and become more confident as they go. In other words, they act a lot like Teddy Roosevelt!

I was watching the Ken Burns documentary The Roosevelts: An Intimate History last week and I was reminded of a story I once read about the 1912 presidential campaign. Teddy Roosevelt had served two terms as president and had decided not to run again in 1908, so his Secretary of War and hand-picked successor William Howard Taft won the presidency. Teddy wasn't happy with Taft's term, however. He also missed the action and excitement of national politics, so he decided to challenge Taft and seek the Republican nomination for president in the 1912 election. He didn't secure the nomination, so he decided to run as a third-party candidate representing the new Progressive (also known as Bull Moose) party.

It was an arduous campaign, raucous and hard fought. So intense and relentless that at one point Roosevelt was shot in the chest during a campaign appearance in Milwaukee, but went on to deliver a 90 minute speech before agreeing to go to the hospital. He was fighting an uphill battle with voters, and his campaign was running short of time and money, but his staff decided to push forward and print an elegant pamphlet with Teddy's photo on the cover for distribution to voters during the final round of whistle-stop tours.

They had three million copies printed, but as they were readying the pamphlets for distribution someone noticed that Moffett Studios in Chicago held a copyright on the cover photo of Teddy. Unfortunately, no one had bothered to obtain permission from Moffett Studios to use the photo. The potential penalty for unauthorized use was staggering-- $1 per pamphlet, or $3 million. The campaign didn't have the time or funds necessary to reprint the pamphlets using another photo, and simply moving forward and incurring the penalty and bad publicity associated with using the photo without permission was not an option. Staff members knew they had no choice but to strike a deal with the photographer, but they hesitated because they believed their bargaining position was weak.

Enter George Perkins, executive secretary of the Progressive Party and Roosevelt's campaign manager, who after being briefed on the situation took immediate action, sending this cable to Moffett:

We are planning to distribute millions of pamphlets with Teddy's photo on the cover. This will be great publicity for the studio who took the photo. How much will you pay us to use yours? Reply immediately.

Moffett replied immediately:

We've never done this before, but under the circumstances we'll offer you $250.

Problem solved!

I have always enjoyed that story, and I've told it many times to illustrate what adaptive capacity looks like. While you might not agree with his approach to Moffett, Perkins was a successful businessman, a heavy hitter, well connected to financier J. P. Morgan, and he knew how to get things done. He had the ability to look at a problem and quickly come up with an unconventional yet brilliant solution, and in this situation he converted a $3 million exposure into a $250 revenue item rather handily. Adaptive capacity, personified! Of course Theodore Roosevelt himself could have served as an adaptive capacity poster boy--a charismatic leader who also happened to be a tireless and prolific writer, an innovator, a problem solver, an obstacle surmounter and an odds-defying achiever and adventurer. Take a look at what he accomplished during his remarkable life here.

Well, the pamphlet got distributed as planned, but as we all know Woodrow Wilson went on to win the 1912 election with 42% of the votes, followed by Roosevelt at 27% and Taft at 23%. The Progressive party nominated Teddy as its presidential candidate again in 1916, but he refused the nomination and never got directly involved in politics again. Two and a half years later he died in his sleep at Sagamore Hill, his family home at Oyster Bay, NY.

Dean K. Harring, CPCU, CIC is a retired Chief Claims Officer and an expert and advisor on property casualty insurance claims and operations.  He can be reached at dean.harring@theclm.org or through  LinkedIn or Twitter.

Just How Difficult Are You?

You are without a doubt the most pretentious, self-absorbed, arrogant, vain and ruthless little tyrant I have ever had the misfortune of knowing. You are emotionally unbalanced and delusional.  For some reason you believe you are special and entitled, demanding praise and attention and privileges you haven't earned and don't deserve--yet you are shamelessly uninterested in the needs and feelings of others. You exploit, criticize, scapegoat and treat others contemptuously, yet you can't tolerate a single word of criticism.  There's only one way to describe you. You are:

(a)  A real jerk

(b)  An infant

(c)  A CEO

(d)  A narcissist

(e)  Other _______________

People I ask seem to be able to identify, without hesitation or difficulty, somebody they know who fits this description, so they quickly and emphatically answer this multiple choice question.  Corporate types tend to choose answers (a) or (c) although in the write-in category (e) the most common answer is "A real asshole" (more on this crass yet technical academic term later.) Politicians, lawyers and ex-spouses also get honorable mention in (e).  Parents of young children, and students of Freud who have read "On Narcissism" (which introduces the concept of His Majesty the Baby) might choose (b).  Psychology majors and anyone who has ever read a book or an article in Time Magazine by Jeffrey Kluger tend to offer up the textbook answer (d), i.e., a person who behaves this way is usually described as a narcissist.
Most of us know the story of Narcissus, retold succinctly in a New Yorker piece by Joan Acocella called Selfie:

In Book III of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, from the first century B.C., we meet Narcissus, a young man so handsome that all the nymphs are in love with him. He doesn’t understand why; he wishes they would leave him alone. One day, in the woods, he comes upon a pool of water and leans over to take a drink. In the reflection, he sees his face for the first time, and falls in love. He swoons, he kisses his image, but he cannot have the thing he desires. In despair, he stops eating, stops sleeping. Finally, he lays his head down on the greensward and dies.

There are longer and darker versions of the story, but the prevailing theme is that Narcissus is so taken with himself that he is incapable of paying attention to anything or anyone else. Narcissism is sometimes described as a "fixation with oneself" but the American Psychiatric Association actually classifies it as a personality disorder.  In Selfie, Acocella also tells us that according to the most recent edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-V) the primary characteristic of narcissism is grandiosity:

Narcissists exaggerate their achievements and what they are certain will be their future triumphs. They believe that they are special and can be understood only by special people, of high status. They feel entitled to extraordinary privileges. (They have the right to cut in line, to dominate the conversation, etc.) They show no empathy for other people. They envy them, and believe that they are envied in return. They cannot tolerate criticism.

If you really want to dig into narcissism, there is no shortage of reading material out there.  I recently read Why Is It Always About You? The Seven Deadly Sins of Narcissism by Sandy Hotchkiss.  She describes seven categories of narcissistic behavior (Shamelessness, Magical Thinking, Arrogance, Envy, Entitlement, Exploitation, and Bad Boundaries) so well that if you read her book you might begin to feel a bit uneasy about your own narcissistic tendencies.  The good news is that if you worry about such things you probably aren't really a narcissist, but just to be sure you can take a quiz here.  It is the Narcissistic Personality Inventory developed by Robert Raskin and Howard Terry of the University of California, Berkeley. I felt a little better after taking the quiz.

Of course the world is teeming with all kinds of people we perceive as difficult, not just narcissists but an eclectic assortment of know-it-alls, liars, cheaters, whiners, complainers, slackers, back-stabbers, perfectionists, illusionists, abusers, bullies, tormentors, mean-spirited rogues, and otherwise nasty weasels.  Robert Sutton, a professor at Stanford University, lumps them all into one descriptive category: assholes.  His entertaining book The No Asshole Rule: Building a Civilized Workplace and Surviving One that Isn't establishes two tests for determining whether someone fits into that category:

• After talking to the alleged asshole, does the "target" feel oppressed, humiliated, de-energized, or belittled? Does he or she feel worse about him or herself?
• Does the alleged asshole aim his or her venom at people who are less powerful rather than at those people who are more powerful?

Sutton also identifies twelve techniques assholes commonly use:

• Personal insults
• Invading "personal territory"
• Uninvited physical contact
• Threats and intimidation
• Sarcastic jokes and teasing, used as insult delivery systems
• Withering email flames
• Status slaps, intended to humiliate victims
• Public shaming
• Rude interruptions
• Two-faced attacks
• Treating people as if they are invisible

Any of this sound familiar? Of course it does. I hear you, and I feel your pain!  I can think of dozens of people I've worked with just in the past ten years who fit quite comfortably into this category. Sutton reminds us that even Steve Jobs, celebrated for his ability to imagine, inspire, motivate and create, was notorious for behaving poorly and routinely used many of these techniques. But while most of us have such tendencies and may slip into poor behavior patterns on occasion, there's a big difference between what he calls "temporary" and "certified" assholes: to qualify as "certified" you have to behave poorly persistently.  If you want to see where you fit on the scale, take Sutton's Asshole Rating Self Exam (ARSE, of course...would you expect anything else?) here, but steel yourself: if your self-rating score gets to a certain level, you will see this admonition from Sutton:

You sound like a full-blown certified asshole to me, get help immediately.  But, please, don't come to me for help, as I would rather not meet you.

Good luck, and be careful out there.

Dean K. Harring, CPCU, CIC is a retired Chief Claims Officer and an expert and advisor on property-casualty insurance claims and operations.  He can be reached at dean.harring@theclm.org or through  LinkedIn or Twitter.

Digital Destruction and Big Bang Disruption

My wife is a project manager who is responsible for business operations at our local high school. She hired some people this summer to process and distribute new textbooks within the school, but they hadn't finished the job and school was about to open, so she needed someone to come in at the last minute and help get the work done. More specifically, someone who would follow her instructions and would not expect to get paid. So I spent a long Saturday with her at the school, schlepping pallets and boxes of new textbooks to the classrooms, getting everything in place in time for the start of the new school year.

I wasn't happy with the work (the school was hot, the textbooks heavy) and more than once I thought wistfully about Steve Jobs, who according to biographer Walter Isaacson, had targeted the school textbook business as an "$8 billion a year industry ripe for digital destruction." Targeting textbooks seemed like a good idea to me because not only are they big and heavy and expensive--they don't update easily, either. Unfortunately, Jobs didn't live long enough to disrupt the textbook industry, but others are on the same path and, selfishly, I wish them well! Check out The Object Formerly Known As The Textbook for an interesting look at how textbook publishers and software companies and educational institutions are juggling for position as textbooks evolve into courseware. Also, As More Schools Embrace Tablets, Do Textbooks Have a Fighting Chance? takes a look at how The Los Angeles Unified School District—second largest school district in the country—is equipping students with iPads and delivering textbooks digitally in a partnership with giant book publisher Pearson.

Harvard professor Clayton Christensen, author of The Innovator's Dilemma, is credited with coming up with the term "disruptive innovation," which he defined as:

...a process by which a product or service takes root initially in simple applications at the bottom of a market and then relentlessly moves up market, eventually displacing established competitors.

These days we tend to associate disruptive innovation with a new or improved product or service that surprises the market, especially established, industry-leading competitors, and increases customer accessibility while lowering costs. The notion is appealing, and it makes for exciting business adventure tales featuring scrappy, innovative underdogs overcoming entrenched, clueless market leaders. Of course disruptive innovation has been happening for a long time, even if it was called something else, but lately technology has made it easier and cheaper for upstart firms to take on industries they think are "ripe for digital destruction."

In her recent article The Disruption Machine, Harvard professor and New Yorker staff writer Jill Lepore squinted hard at disruption theory, though:

Ever since “The Innovator’s Dilemma,” everyone is either disrupting or being disrupted. There are disruption consultants, disruption conferences, and disruption seminars. This fall, the University of Southern California is opening a new program: “The degree is in disruption,” the university announced.

By the way, USC's Jimmy Iovine and Andre Young Academy for Arts, Technology and the Business of Innovation is in fact opening this year and will focus on critical thinking with plans, according to the Academy website, to "...empower the next generation of disruptors and professional thought leaders who will ply their skills in a global area." And yes, that is Dr. Dre's name on the Academy!

But there are others who believe we have now entered a decidedly more treacherous innovation environment, one that Josh Linkner in The Road to Reinvention says is forcing companies to systematically and continually challenge and reinvent themselves in order to survive. His fundamental question is this: "Will you disrupt, or be disrupted?" And Paul Nunes and Larry Downes, Accenture folks who wrote an article for the Harvard Business Review Magazine in 2013 entitled Big Bang Disruption (they have a new book on the same topic, summarized by Accenture here) warn of a new type of innovation which is more than disruptive--it's devastating:

...a Big Bang Disruptor is both better and cheaper from the moment of creation. Using new technologies...Big Bang Disruptors can destabilize mature industries in record time, leaving incumbents and their supply-chain partners dazed and devastated.

Should CEOs be worried? When Mikhail Gorbachev visited Harvard in 2007 and said “If you don’t move forward, sooner or later you begin to move backward”, he was talking about politics and multilateral nuclear treaties, not companies, but the warning certainly could have been directed at company CEOs. That message, refreshed to incorporate the disruptive and big bang innovation threats that have emerged since then, seems a bit unsettling: If you run a company and you aren't dedicating resources to continually scanning the marketplace for threats and improving and reinventing your business, if you are instead taking a "business as usual" approach, you are at risk of being marginalized or supplanted by competitors who will bring new products, services, experiences, efficiencies, cost structures and insights to your customers. Maybe not this year, or next year, but sometime soon. It's not a question of whether it will happen, but when. Thus Linkner's question, restated: Will you disrupt yourself, or be disrupted by someone else?

Of course some industries, like property casualty insurance, may not be high on anyone's "ripe for digital destruction" list, so maybe there's no need for insurance company CEOs to worry. Except perhaps about Google and Amazon. I keep thinking back to Blockbuster CEO Jim Keyes' comments to The Motley Fool in 2008: "Neither RedBox nor Netflix are even on the radar screen in terms of competition." You know the rest of the story, which illustrates the real-life consequences of an incumbent underestimating and then becoming "dazed and devastated" by a competitor.

Dean K. Harrring, CPCU, CIC is a retired Chief Claims Officer and an expert and advisor on property casualty insurance claims and operations.  He can be reached at dean.harring@theclm.org or through  LinkedIn or Twitter.

Righteous Denials

I have what could be described as an accumulation problem, and it involves newspapers and magazines. It is mostly self-inflicted, since I haven’t yet convinced myself to transition to digital subscriptions, but it is chronic as new paper items arrive every day and I refuse to recycle those that remain unread. Instead, I create "read later" piles and then intermittently try to deal with those piles, as I did last week when I sat down on my screen porch, surrounded by stacks of newspapers and magazines, intending to read and recycle until current.

Unfortunately, reading world news in large doses can be disheartening, and when your mind wanders off in search of more uplifting thoughts while you are reading, you end up not remembering what you just read. This has everything to do with how your working memory operates, and how your two competing modes of attention (focused and wandering) interact. See Hit the Reset Button in Your Brain by Daniel J. Levitin for an enlightening description of how it all works.

So while I wasn’t concerned when my mind began to wander, I was surprised when this quote from Nobel Prize winning poet, dramatist and literary critic T.S. Eliot popped into my head:

“Most of the evil in this world is done by people with good intentions.”

I have been unable to discover the original context of his statement, but if I take it at face value and consider it from today’s perspective I have difficulty accepting the premise that most evil is accidental and unintended. Fellow Nobel Prize winner Albert Camus’ observation in The Plague somehow seems closer to the mark:

“The evil that is in the world always comes of ignorance, and good intentions may do as much harm as malevolence, if they lack understanding.”

The concept that actions taken with good intentions, but fueled by ignorance or lack of understanding, can be as harmful as actions taken with bad intentions isn’t really surprising. We’ve all worked with both types of people: the well-intentioned but uninformed folks who, through their lack of understanding and/or incompetence, cause all kinds of trouble and damage, and the malevolent ones who intentionally do harm. But the Camus quote reminded me of something else, something I hadn’t thought about for many years, something that used to be a problem in claims handling in the early 1990s. We called it the righteous denial.

Righteous denials occurred when an insurer refused to honor a first party property claim simply because, in the opinion of the claims handler, something wasn’t quite right with it. The decision to deny, usually made at the local claims office level, was often not evidence-based; sometimes the denial would be issued before the investigation had even been completed. The written comments in the file supporting the denial were usually colorfully raw and emphatic, flavored with instinct or emotion. You know, comments like “This claim stinks” or “This guy is a crook” or “I know he set this fire, no matter what the Fire Marshal says.” It goes without saying that these were called “righteous” denials because the claim handlers earnestly, perhaps even sanctimoniously, imagined themselves occupying the moral high ground. They were driven and determined to resist any claim that seemed inflated or fraudulent, against all odds and at all costs.

Don't get me wrong--these were not evil people intent on doing harm. But their doggedness to do what they saw as the “right thing”--even if the evidence didn’t entirely support doing it—arguably interfered with the performance of the duties of good faith and fair dealing that insurance companies owed to the people they insured. The litigation that followed exposed insurers to negative publicity, contractual damages in excess of policy limits, and to direct actions for extra-contractual damages, including punitive damages in some cases.

It may be hard to believe now, but back then most claims handlers didn’t understand what “bad faith” claim handling was, and they never imagined that their righteous denials could contribute to such unfortunate outcomes. Their good intentions, pursued intractably with ignorance and a lack of understanding, were characterized in litigation as egregious, outrageous, unscrupulous, arbitrary, capricious, reckless and/or unreasonable behaviors designed to avoid claim payment while placing the insurer’s interests ahead of the insureds’. And their claim file comments were used against them as evidence to support that characterization.

Those were stimulating and challenging times. As I recall, it required quite a bit of time and effort to change the underlying operating mindset and banish the righteous denial, in part because some claims handlers had a hard time “unlearning” something they believed in so strongly. Of course adults often have trouble learning and integrating things that conflict with something they believe they already know. Jane Bozarth described it this way in her article Nuts and Bolts: Unlearning:

Old habits are hard to break, and revising old thinking patterns, even when one recognizes the need for change, is challenging. And when we’re under pressure the old learning may reemerge, as it has a longer history inside our responses.

I need to get back to my reading, but for more about first party bad faith and the history of bad faith in general, check out the ABA’s Recovery of Extra-Contractual (“Consequential”) Damages in First-Party Bad Faith Cases and Thomas F. Segalla’s Bad Faith as a Continuum: From Claim to Trial.

Dean K. Harring, CPCU, CIC is a retired Chief Claims Officer and an expert and advisor on Property Casualty insurance claims and operations. He can be reached at dean.harring@theclm.org or through LinkedIn or Twitter.

Airports, Innovation and Go Fever

I don't spend much time in airports anymore, and I admit to being grateful for that. For me, air travel has degenerated into an unpleasant and frustrating series of annoying experiences, end to end. Parking, baggage, security, boarding, being on board--all aggravating and uncomfortable, but hard to avoid when you need to travel long distances quickly.

I was walking through BWI airport after a flight a few weeks ago, studying the crowd flowing past me, and I realized I was surrounded by miserable, unhappy people--people in transit--apprehensively winding their way through a noisy, competitive obstacle course bristling with deadlines, pressures and uncertainties. Kids wailing, wishing they were somewhere else. Teenagers with eyes fixed on their phones, or scanning the baseboards looking for electrical outlets for a quick charge. Flushed, exasperated travelers. Grimacing, arguing, whining, snarling into phones and at airline personnel and at each other. Some dutifully playing the role of designated navigational obstacles, bumbling and shuffling along, blocking the walkways and standing in the wrong lines. Others speed walking, aggressively bobbing and weaving, dragging companions and kids and enormous wheeled bags behind them, while glaring at the elite priority platinum business travelers pirouetting to the front of the line. All these poor souls desperately trying to do one thing: escape from the airport, either in a plane (departures) or out the front door (arrivals.) I quickened my pace toward the exit.

Outside, I stood near a family with a talkative and curious child, about 7, who was interrogating his father:

Q: Why are we standing here?

A: We are waiting for our ride home.

Q: Do we have to?

A: Yes.

Q: I'm hot. Why can't we wait inside where it is cool?

A: We are waiting here.

Q: Why?

A: Because I said so, that's why.

The child let it drop. Is it any wonder we learn to stop asking questions when we are young? Even if we didn't have mind-shrinking conversations like that with our parents, in school we quickly learned that doing well involved answering questions, not asking them. Asking questions is an integral part of learning, creating, and innovating, however, so there's a cost. Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman described it this way in their Newsweek article: The Creativity Crisis

Preschool children, on average, ask their parents about 100 questions a day. Why, why, why—sometimes parents just wish it’d stop. Tragically, it does stop. By middle school they've pretty much stopped asking. It’s no coincidence that this same time is when student motivation and engagement plummet. They didn't stop asking questions because they lost interest: it’s the other way around. They lost interest because they stopped asking questions.

Sir Ken Robinson, in his wildly popular (over 27 million views) TED talk Do Schools Kill Creativity?, makes the point that while young children are usually not frightened of trying new things and they have no worries about being wrong, by the time they become adults most have learned it is safer to avoid taking chances, to limit the possibility of making mistakes. Schools, by stigmatizing mistakes, educate people out of their creative capabilities. Companies are run that way, too, says Robinson: "If you are not prepared to be wrong, you'll never come up with anything original."

I think it is fair to say that most of the large, bureaucratic companies I have worked with over the years valued compliance much more than they valued innovation or creativity. Employees were rewarded for knowing and following the company's policies and procedures, and reprimanded for making mistakes, particularly if the mistakes involved deviating from established company best practices. Rethinking processes, imagining new products or services, experimenting with new approaches--these activities were rare because they were potentially dangerous to an individual's career (penalties for failure) and it was just easier and safer to stick with established protocols. If something really needed to change, the smart move was to call in a consulting firm and have them make the change recommendations. This dynamic is probably what Rosabeth Moss Kanter was thinking about when she penned the line: "Mindless habitual behavior is the enemy of innovation.”

Yet innovation isn't frightening just because it involves implementing something new—a product, a service, a process, an alliance, a market, or an experience. It is frightening because of the expectation that the new thing will somehow create value and improve results. So while thinking and talking about innovation is easy, innovating demands execution, a commitment to a new course of action, a personal, public leap of faith. There's a steady drumbeat of danger, disruption, and discomfort that accompanies that leap, and given there's never any guarantee of success, innovation looks just like the sort of thing we learned to avoid back in elementary school. Innovation may be a popular discussion topic these days, but not much of it seems to be happening in the property casualty business. (See Innovate or Die. Really?)

Every once in a while, though, circumstances conspire to create a high urgency insurance company version of a "go fever" situation, pushing innovation and transformation to center stage. This can happen for many reasons, like when a new CEO makes lofty promises to investors about expense containment or growth, or when a company is not competing effectively and needs to hit the reset button to get back in the game.

The "go fever" scenario adds another level of risk to any innovation/transformation effort. Even though Jack Welch says innovation ought to be everyone's job, all the time, in a "go fever" situation someone is usually chosen to drive the innovation/transformation process and deliver the anticipated benefits, quickly. Under pressure to deliver, to get things done, there is a huge temptation to take short cuts, to start the change process without first becoming sufficiently familiar with the realities and constraints of the system being evaluated. I suppose it's a bit like starting surgery without first getting the patient's medical history, working up a diagnosis, and preparing a surgical plan. Without a baseline understanding and appreciation of the rules and regulations and intricacies and dependencies of whatever it is that needs to improve, even the best plans and intentions will be shaken and undermined by unintended consequences, unforeseen obstacles, false assumptions and unanticipated collateral damage.

Of course unintended consequences, unforeseen obstacles, false assumptions and unanticipated collateral damage look and sound a lot like undesirable outcomes, and they can derail and/or kill an innovation project and the career of the person driving it. Sure, there's no guarantee that better preparation would help avoid such outcomes, but a more informed and enlightened innovation approach arguably would at least put the risks on the radar screen.

So if you are tapped to run a high profile innovation/transformation project, job one should be to get yourself familiar with the realities and constraints of the system. By all means, ask questions of the people actively involved in managing the work, but don't demonize or penalize them for pointing out obstacles or risks or dependencies no one had considered previously. Gather the facts, and don't fall into the trap of accepting any single point of view as definitive, even if it is the CEO's; seek insight and understanding instead. Remember philosopher Marshall McLuhan's cryptic admonition: “A point of view can be a dangerous luxury when substituted for insight and understanding.”

For an entertaining and informative look at failure, the costs of failure avoidance, and "go fever", check out the Freakonomics podcast Failure is Your Friend.

Dean K. Harring, CPCU, CIC is a retired Chief Claims Officer and an expert and advisor on Property Casualty insurance claims and operations. He can be reached at dean.harring@theclm.org or through LinkedIn or Twitter.

The Consultants Your Boss Hired Are Here to See You...

If you are running an insurance claims operation, and your boss or the board brings in outside consulting experts to evaluate it, chances are you have a problem. Not just the problem the consultants are being called in to examine, but a pricklier, more personal problem--a perception problem. Someone with some clout in your organization apparently doesn't believe you are capable of doing whatever it is the consultants are going to be doing.

That puts you in a tricky situation, one that demands thoughtful action. First of all, don't try to convince your boss or the board that you are an expert and that you don't need outside assistance to handle the situation. Don't waste time arguing that your training and years of experience managing claims qualify you for the challenge. Do understand that the decision has already gone the other way, and any attempt you make to reverse it looks like resistance, concealment, perhaps even cluelessness.

Think about it. If you argue that there is no problem, or the problem is outside of claims, or that every claims operation has the same problem, you risk being classified as stubborn, change averse, and overly comfortable with the status quo. If you protest that you have already diagnosed the problem and designed a solution, realize that others don't see it that way. They want another opinion, another perspective. Maybe they don't like your plan, or perhaps it conflicts with some other course of action they want to pursue. It could be they don't quite know what the problem is, but there's something troublesome in the loss numbers, and they want to understand why it is happening and what to do about it. Or, worst case for you, they might just be looking for evidence and justification for overhauling your organization and/or escorting you out the door.

The reason really doesn't matter, but your response does. As activist and author Jerry Rubin once said: "The power to define the situation is the ultimate power." You have the power to assist in framing the inquiry and shaping the outcome by being visible and playing an active, cooperative role with the experts during the engagement. Take advantage of that power.

First, welcome the consultants and make arrangements to provide them with whatever help and information they need. Brief them fully on your organization, your strategy, and your operating procedures. Impress them with the dashboards and controls you use to manage risks and results. Talk to them about process efficiency, effectiveness, and loss cost management techniques. Show them how you establish and monitor key performance indicators and how you interact and communicate with your stakeholders. Demonstrate how you identify and incorporate best practices in your claims handling processes. If some of the consultants lack industry knowledge and have no background in claims--don't be dismayed. Instead, patiently take the time to make sure they fully grasp how your company functions and how your operation contributes to results. In other words, do whatever you can to provide the experts with plenty of evidence supporting the proposition that when it comes to running an insurance claims operation: 1) you know what to do, 2) you know how to do it, and 3) you are doing it, quite well.

The consultants' job is to identify performance gaps and root causes, and propose actions to close those gaps. Your objective should be to provide them with the information, the insights and the support they need to do that job well. People who hire consultants usually believe the consultants will bring very high levels of knowledge, objectivity, credibility and perceptiveness to the engagement. While that belief might not always be accurate, the reality is that consultants' findings are accepted as authoritative in most cases. That means their recommendations will impact you and your organization, so it makes sense for you to invest your time and effort into framing the inquiry and shaping the outcome. Give it your best shot--you might even learn something in the process.

The downside is that in tricky, prickly situations like this there is no guarantee things will turn out well even if you do everything right. Sometimes there are hidden operating agendas, foregone conclusions and predetermined outcomes underlying the consulting engagement, and unless you know about those factors going in, there's not much you can do to manage their impact.

Dean K. Harring, CPCU, CIC is a retired Chief Claims Officer and an expert and advisor on property casualty insurance claims and operations. He can be reached at dean.harring@theclm.org or through LinkedIn

Invisible Man on Third…

I was wandering around my yard after dinner the other night, half-heartedly taking inventory of the garden chores I had been dodging, when I noticed some kids playing kickball across the street. There were six of them, three per team, and they were pretty good kickers, so they were doing a lot of base running. I chuckled when the tall kid standing on third base yelled "Invisible man on third!," at which point the base runners on first and second and the kids on the other team watched intently while he jogged to home plate to kick. Bases loaded, invisible man on third! I hadn't heard that proclamation for a long time, but if you have ever played kickball, stickball, baseball or softball with teams of three or less, you know all about the invisible man.

For some reason, that kickball game got me thinking about invisibility as a attribute in planning and operations and personal behavior. In certain circumstances, as in the small team base-running scenario, it is an operating imperative as the game can't proceed unless the invisible runner rule is invoked. Invisibility is the goal of many corporate security protocols, to protect sensitive information, to preserve privacy and confidentiality, and to shield intellectual property from attack or discovery. It is the intended product of stealth functionality, to camouflage activities while providing cover or anonymity. It can be an element of a individual's operating model, or a preference, as when someone acts behind the scenes or tries to avoid visibility or to otherwise conceal their activities. And sometimes it emerges as an incidental factor in a program or project, usually through negligence or inadvertence, when folks aren't paying attention and ownership, accountability and decision rights don't get clearly established.

My first encounter with a corporate version of the invisible man came decades ago while I was working as a claims supervisor for a large insurer in Massachusetts. I remember the claims supervisor job as a tough one, largely because the supervisor was responsible for monitoring and directing a hefty and constantly shifting portfolio of claims toward timely and appropriate resolution. Theoretically, the supervisor would assign the claims to claims handlers who moved them through the phases--investigation, evaluation and resolution--but sometimes there just weren't enough claim handlers available to handle all the claims. Turnover, training, vacations, hiring freezes, an increasing volume of new claims--any one of these things could create a situation where there were too many claims and not enough claim handlers. The solution? At that particular company the solution was Mr. X, who had a diary number and carried a large caseload of slow moving claims reassigned from other claim handlers. Every claims supervisor had a Mr.X on staff. He was imaginary and invisible, so he wasn't able to accomplish anything on the claims, but the reassignments to Mr.X created workload capacity so the real claim handlers could handle more new claims. Mr.X was an operating imperative.
 
Years later, I bumped into Mr.X's cousins at a third party claims administrator in New Jersey. The TPA had guaranteed their clients that claim workloads would not exceed a certain number per claim handler. As the end of the month approached, if workloads were higher than promised the TPA claims supervisors would reassign claims to themselves or to their office manager to reduce the claim handler workloads to the agreed number. This was done for stealth reasons, to conceal actual workload levels. Of course the supervisors and manager weren't imaginary or invisible, but they may as well have been since they did not actually work on the claims assigned to them. They were simply placeholders until after month end, at which point the claims would be reassigned to the claims handlers.

Radio and TV journalist Richard Harkness is credited with drafting this definition of a committee: "A group of the unwilling, picked from the unfit, to do the unnecessary." While I think that characterization is a bit severe, I have probably been on too many committees, so I believe it is fair to say that most committees have at least one member who fails to attend meetings and contributes little or nothing to the committee's work. That's awkward enough, but when the invisible committee member also happens to be the committee chair, it is even more awkward. I remember working on a committee in New York where the chair would schedule a meeting, then miss the meeting at the last minute because of a vague, recurring malady he described only as "man flu." The committee would meet without him, cover the agenda, provide him with the minutes, then he would schedule another meeting, and at the last minute...well, you have probably lived this dream yourself. He was an absentee committee chair, he took credit for the committee's work, yet he never contributed anything to that work.

I have seen the same type of incidental invisibility in large scale technology development and/or implementation projects, where it is frequently difficult to determine who, if anyone, actually "owns" the project. I always ask two questions: 1) Has any one person actually been tasked with setting direction, managing obstacles and making decisions on the project? 2) Is there a real person who knows and understands he/she will be held responsible and accountable if things don't work out as expected on the project? It is usually easy to identify the project sponsor, and the steering committee, and the subject matter experts, and the IT folks who are managing the project, but the project owner is often not visible. Why? Either project ownership responsibility was never specifically assigned or, more likely, ownership was assigned to a committee. Psychologist Will Schutz was no doubt thinking of something else when he wrote this, but he did a good job of describing the inevitable, unfortunate outcome when an owner-less or committee-owned project fails to meet expectations: "Everyone is responsible but no one is to blame."

It is even worse when the wrong person or department is identified as the owner. I think it is crazy for Human Resources executives to own an employee engagement project, for example, or for IT executives to own a technology development or implementation project. These are business projects, and they should be owned by the business leader who convinced the organization that he/she had a problem or an opportunity, and that the project was the solution. Sure, HR and IT are there to assist, to provide expertise, structure, oversight, and maybe even project management, but the business person owner needs to remain visible, responsible and accountable.

Jonathan Lethem made a point about invisibility in his book Chronic City: "The invisible are always so resolutely invisible, until you see them." That's true in business and in life, I suppose, but no matter how hard you try, you'll never be able to see the invisible man on third.  That's just the way it is.

Dean K. Harring, CPCU, CIC is a retired Chief Claims Officer and an expert and advisor on Property Casualty insurance claims and operations. He can be reached at dean.harring@theclm.org or through LinkedIn or Twitter.