For 2 decades, I lived inside the corporate walls of the construction and insurance worlds, building a career focused on managing exposures that often stretched into the billions. From the outside, it probably looked like the epitome of high-powered corporate safety. But from the inside, I saw something different: a pervasive fear of innovation, as well as systems that were too slow to adapt. It drove me to realize a core truth: Sometimes, the most dangerous move isn't taking a risk, it's standing perfectly still.
The prevailing attitude in risk management often dictates that our primary job is avoidance—to eliminate risk, transfer it, or mitigate it until it barely registers. We buy insurance, we contractually shift the burden, or we retain and manage the rest. However, risk is not inherently bad. It is, in fact, where growth and profitability reside.
My biggest personal risk was leaving that high-powered corporate life to bet on myself, establishing a consulting practice dedicated to evolving how risk is managed across society. My objective wasn't merely to advise; it was to change the rules of the game entirely, shifting the focus from simply protection to active partnership and strategic opportunity.
Risk: The Hidden Engine of Profit
To innovate how risk is managed, we must first change how we talk about risk. Too often, the word "risk" carries a flinch—an immediate negative connotation. But the really successful managers and executives are the ones who understand their risk inside and out, recognizing what they are good at and what they aren't. They get rid of the risks that they aren't equipped to handle, and they strategically keep the risks that act as a profitability driver.
I recall sitting with a contractor who told me their specialty was "troubled projects"—jobs that were over budget, behind schedule, and facing colossal problems. My first thought, and certainly the underwriter's thought, was that this was a terrible, high-risk business. Yet, after asking questions (which is always the first step in innovation), I learned they were exceptionally skilled at turning those troubled projects around. They charged a premium for it, making a substantial profit by taking on a risk that, to them, was just "table stakes."
For that contractor, the perceived risk wasn't risky at all; it was their bread and butter. This taught me that risk is where the reward is. If you possess the specialized expertise to take on a challenge others flee from, you deserve to be rewarded for it. We must shed the demonization of the word "risk" and see it as a necessary component of growth.
The Problem with the Old Rules: Insurance Is Not Risk Management
One of the biggest obstacles to innovating risk management is the traditional mindset of the insurance industry itself. We often confuse the mechanism with the outcome.
The truth is that insurance companies often think way too much about insurance. For our clients—the corporate risk managers—insurance is just one small tool in a vast toolbox of challenges. They have buildings to protect, supply chain issues, geopolitical tensions, and talent crises—they've got 99 problems, and insurance is just one of them.
The industry focuses heavily on the insurance product—the insurance policy—which makes the relationship transactional. We talk about renewals, rates, and claims. We even use strange language; what we call "loss control" is what the client experiences as "profit erosion" or worse, "an injured worker." We speak a language that works for our underwriting minds but doesn't necessarily resonate with the financial risks faced by a Fortune 500 company.
The industry has a special, unique opportunity that others in the value chain do not: We share the risk. When an insurer makes a recommendation, they have skin in the game because they pick up the risk at a certain attachment point. This positioning allows us to evolve from a product seller to a genuine risk management business partner that sells insurance as one tool to help manage risk. That creates a much stickier, friendlier, and longer-term relationship than simply talking about next year's rates.
The Innovation Ecosystem: A New Service Model
The realization that the industry needed to focus holistically on risk management, rather than just on the policy, drove one of my most significant corporate achievements: creating an innovation ecosystem for a major global insurer.
Innovation is, by definition, about doing things you've never done before to achieve outcomes that haven't been seen yet. It's about solving complex business problems through new methods, creating new value, making that solution business as usual, and then moving on to the next challenge. A lot of those ideas will fail, but the goal is to churn through them and find the ones that elevate the business.
This ecosystem was born out of client demand. As a risk engineer, I was often on jobsites, and construction clients would consistently ask, "We appreciate your typical risk engineering advice, but what about all this new technology? How does it affect my risk? How do I adopt it? What are my peers doing?"
We realized that, while these requests had nothing to do with buying an insurance policy, they offered an incredible opportunity. If we could help clients bridge the technological gap and digitally transform their business, we would likely reduce their risk, and more importantly, we would gain their brand loyalty and trust as a true business partner.
The program we built had three key pillars.
Benchmarking. We created a personalized benchmarking service to help clients determine their technology adoption maturity index, showing them where they stood relative to their peers.
Curated solutions. We vetted a suite of technologies that we put a "gold star" on, identifying them as valuable and risk-reducing. We then negotiated discounts for our clients to use them, serving as a trusted source for due diligence.
Peer network. Crucially, I have an abundance mindset, not a scarcity mindset. I didn't want to control all the information; I wanted to facilitate connection. We created a peer group for innovation leaders to share knowledge and solutions with each other.
The ultimate goal was to transform the insurer from a policy seller into a consultant that insured. This shift in the service model reaped long-term benefits in business retention and cross-selling, proving that focusing on the client's holistic risk journey creates measurable financial value for the insurer.
The Technological Leap: Predict and Prevent
The future of risk management hinges on technology that allows us to move away from reacting to problems after they occur to a model of predicting and preventing.
One major technological shift enabling this is data-driven parametric insurance. This is an automatic payout based on a trigger that neither the insurer nor the insured can influence, such as specific weather events (e.g., too hot, too cold, too windy, too wet, or too dry).
The beauty of this model is efficiency: While the insurer might pay out on some losses that didn't technically result in damage, they save significantly on adjustment costs, which are a major expense in the combined ratio. They skip the paperwork, the back-and-forth, and the lawyers. It transforms the claims process from a potentially antagonistic, impersonal experience ("claims adjuster" is a weirdly impersonal term) into a simple, efficient transaction. The key limitation, of course, is ensuring the trigger is truly outside of human control; you can't parametrically insure a construction schedule if the contractor can manipulate the timing to receive a payout.
More broadly, technology like artificial intelligence (AI) and generative AI is foundational to modern risk innovation. However, it requires a significant institutional shift. We must stop relying solely on historical data, because what happened in the last 10 years is not indicative of what will happen in the next 10. AI fundamentally changes pricing and risk management by providing a more holistic view of future probabilities.
This means that the insurance industry must embrace new architectures that are moving past the hype phase to become necessary tools for secure, operational AI. These architectures enhance trust and auditability, which is vital for new products and for ensuring data integrity as we move toward real-time decision-making.
The Human Challenge: Pushing the Big Rock
Even with the best technology, true innovation is an uphill battle against the legacy organization: Large companies struggle against inertia, politics, and complexity. For decades, professionals in insurance—underwriters, engineers, and claims staff—have been trained to find a successful process and repeat it perfectly. Deviating from the norm often results in negative outcomes.
However, innovation is about challenging that norm. This creates a cultural conflict that must be addressed with soft skills and collaboration.
When I was the head of innovation, I was focused on how to make the new things business as usual. But my time also taught me a crucial lesson about leadership and influence: The numbers don't tell the whole story. If you make decisions on numbers only—for example, passing on a client due to a terrible loss history—you miss the human context. Maybe they just hired a new CEO, or maybe they implemented new technology that will drastically change their risk profile. If you rely only on the linearity of spreadsheets, you miss the predictive quality of meeting the people involved.
When seeking to introduce change, you must avoid being perceived as telling people that they were doing it wrong. The ideas you bring in will naturally be challenged, not only because people dislike change but because they don't like change that wasn't their idea.
My approach is always to ask questions first, such as the following.
"Tell me what the context is around that. Help me understand how you got here." I want to know why something is done the way it is now before I propose a fix.
"What would happen if we tried this?" Instead of saying "This is better," I invite them to explore the consequences of a new path.
This approach brings people into the conversation, helps them feel ownership over the solution, and respects the fact that they might have already tried—and failed—years ago.
The Solopreneur Advantage and the Market's Blind Spots
My transition to consulting was driven by the desire to solve new problems and work on the big picture evolution of risk management, which was constrained by being loyal to one corporate bottom line. The feeling of freedom now comes from being able to look at the entire ecosystem—the technologies, insurers, brokers, and end users—through multiple lenses. I can advise a large competitor I couldn't have spoken to before, which broadens my impact exponentially.
In this new role, I've identified the following clear blind spots across the market.
InsurTechs/technologies. Their biggest blind spot is failing to understand the deeply entrenched insurance industry they are entering. They know technology really well, but they start pitching with their features rather than the business problem. A significant part of my work is helping them achieve product-market fit and effective go-to-market strategies.
Insurers. They have the resources and the desire to innovate, but they are fighting that uphill battle against their own legacy organizations. The challenge here is stakeholder management and creating a culture where it's safe to challenge the norm.
The future of risk management is not just about writing better insurance policies or processing claims faster; it is about embracing innovation as an organizational necessity. The technology is rapidly advancing, offering tools like AI and decentralized architectures that can genuinely transform insurance from a necessary evil to a highly valued service that provides peace of mind.
To achieve this transformation, we must maintain a relentless curiosity, adopt an AI-first mindset, and recognize that data quality is the foundational element that supports every successful change. Ultimately, to truly innovate risk management, we have to recognize the financial and cultural cost of stagnation. Betting on calculated risk, coupled with courage and strategy, will always yield a higher return than simply standing still and waiting for the world to change around you.
Opinions expressed in Expert Commentary articles are those of the author and are not necessarily held by the author's employer or IRMI. Expert Commentary articles and other IRMI Online content do not purport to provide legal, accounting, or other professional advice or opinion. If such advice is needed, consult with your attorney, accountant, or other qualified adviser.
For 2 decades, I lived inside the corporate walls of the construction and insurance worlds, building a career focused on managing exposures that often stretched into the billions. From the outside, it probably looked like the epitome of high-powered corporate safety. But from the inside, I saw something different: a pervasive fear of innovation, as well as systems that were too slow to adapt. It drove me to realize a core truth: Sometimes, the most dangerous move isn't taking a risk, it's standing perfectly still.
The prevailing attitude in risk management often dictates that our primary job is avoidance—to eliminate risk, transfer it, or mitigate it until it barely registers. We buy insurance, we contractually shift the burden, or we retain and manage the rest. However, risk is not inherently bad. It is, in fact, where growth and profitability reside.
My biggest personal risk was leaving that high-powered corporate life to bet on myself, establishing a consulting practice dedicated to evolving how risk is managed across society. My objective wasn't merely to advise; it was to change the rules of the game entirely, shifting the focus from simply protection to active partnership and strategic opportunity.
Risk: The Hidden Engine of Profit
To innovate how risk is managed, we must first change how we talk about risk. Too often, the word "risk" carries a flinch—an immediate negative connotation. But the really successful managers and executives are the ones who understand their risk inside and out, recognizing what they are good at and what they aren't. They get rid of the risks that they aren't equipped to handle, and they strategically keep the risks that act as a profitability driver.
I recall sitting with a contractor who told me their specialty was "troubled projects"—jobs that were over budget, behind schedule, and facing colossal problems. My first thought, and certainly the underwriter's thought, was that this was a terrible, high-risk business. Yet, after asking questions (which is always the first step in innovation), I learned they were exceptionally skilled at turning those troubled projects around. They charged a premium for it, making a substantial profit by taking on a risk that, to them, was just "table stakes."
For that contractor, the perceived risk wasn't risky at all; it was their bread and butter. This taught me that risk is where the reward is. If you possess the specialized expertise to take on a challenge others flee from, you deserve to be rewarded for it. We must shed the demonization of the word "risk" and see it as a necessary component of growth.
The Problem with the Old Rules: Insurance Is Not Risk Management
One of the biggest obstacles to innovating risk management is the traditional mindset of the insurance industry itself. We often confuse the mechanism with the outcome.
The truth is that insurance companies often think way too much about insurance. For our clients—the corporate risk managers—insurance is just one small tool in a vast toolbox of challenges. They have buildings to protect, supply chain issues, geopolitical tensions, and talent crises—they've got 99 problems, and insurance is just one of them.
The industry focuses heavily on the insurance product—the insurance policy—which makes the relationship transactional. We talk about renewals, rates, and claims. We even use strange language; what we call "loss control" is what the client experiences as "profit erosion" or worse, "an injured worker." We speak a language that works for our underwriting minds but doesn't necessarily resonate with the financial risks faced by a Fortune 500 company.
The industry has a special, unique opportunity that others in the value chain do not: We share the risk. When an insurer makes a recommendation, they have skin in the game because they pick up the risk at a certain attachment point. This positioning allows us to evolve from a product seller to a genuine risk management business partner that sells insurance as one tool to help manage risk. That creates a much stickier, friendlier, and longer-term relationship than simply talking about next year's rates.
The Innovation Ecosystem: A New Service Model
The realization that the industry needed to focus holistically on risk management, rather than just on the policy, drove one of my most significant corporate achievements: creating an innovation ecosystem for a major global insurer.
Innovation is, by definition, about doing things you've never done before to achieve outcomes that haven't been seen yet. It's about solving complex business problems through new methods, creating new value, making that solution business as usual, and then moving on to the next challenge. A lot of those ideas will fail, but the goal is to churn through them and find the ones that elevate the business.
This ecosystem was born out of client demand. As a risk engineer, I was often on jobsites, and construction clients would consistently ask, "We appreciate your typical risk engineering advice, but what about all this new technology? How does it affect my risk? How do I adopt it? What are my peers doing?"
We realized that, while these requests had nothing to do with buying an insurance policy, they offered an incredible opportunity. If we could help clients bridge the technological gap and digitally transform their business, we would likely reduce their risk, and more importantly, we would gain their brand loyalty and trust as a true business partner.
The program we built had three key pillars.
The ultimate goal was to transform the insurer from a policy seller into a consultant that insured. This shift in the service model reaped long-term benefits in business retention and cross-selling, proving that focusing on the client's holistic risk journey creates measurable financial value for the insurer.
The Technological Leap: Predict and Prevent
The future of risk management hinges on technology that allows us to move away from reacting to problems after they occur to a model of predicting and preventing.
One major technological shift enabling this is data-driven parametric insurance. This is an automatic payout based on a trigger that neither the insurer nor the insured can influence, such as specific weather events (e.g., too hot, too cold, too windy, too wet, or too dry).
The beauty of this model is efficiency: While the insurer might pay out on some losses that didn't technically result in damage, they save significantly on adjustment costs, which are a major expense in the combined ratio. They skip the paperwork, the back-and-forth, and the lawyers. It transforms the claims process from a potentially antagonistic, impersonal experience ("claims adjuster" is a weirdly impersonal term) into a simple, efficient transaction. The key limitation, of course, is ensuring the trigger is truly outside of human control; you can't parametrically insure a construction schedule if the contractor can manipulate the timing to receive a payout.
More broadly, technology like artificial intelligence (AI) and generative AI is foundational to modern risk innovation. However, it requires a significant institutional shift. We must stop relying solely on historical data, because what happened in the last 10 years is not indicative of what will happen in the next 10. AI fundamentally changes pricing and risk management by providing a more holistic view of future probabilities.
This means that the insurance industry must embrace new architectures that are moving past the hype phase to become necessary tools for secure, operational AI. These architectures enhance trust and auditability, which is vital for new products and for ensuring data integrity as we move toward real-time decision-making.
The Human Challenge: Pushing the Big Rock
Even with the best technology, true innovation is an uphill battle against the legacy organization: Large companies struggle against inertia, politics, and complexity. For decades, professionals in insurance—underwriters, engineers, and claims staff—have been trained to find a successful process and repeat it perfectly. Deviating from the norm often results in negative outcomes.
However, innovation is about challenging that norm. This creates a cultural conflict that must be addressed with soft skills and collaboration.
When I was the head of innovation, I was focused on how to make the new things business as usual. But my time also taught me a crucial lesson about leadership and influence: The numbers don't tell the whole story. If you make decisions on numbers only—for example, passing on a client due to a terrible loss history—you miss the human context. Maybe they just hired a new CEO, or maybe they implemented new technology that will drastically change their risk profile. If you rely only on the linearity of spreadsheets, you miss the predictive quality of meeting the people involved.
When seeking to introduce change, you must avoid being perceived as telling people that they were doing it wrong. The ideas you bring in will naturally be challenged, not only because people dislike change but because they don't like change that wasn't their idea.
My approach is always to ask questions first, such as the following.
This approach brings people into the conversation, helps them feel ownership over the solution, and respects the fact that they might have already tried—and failed—years ago.
The Solopreneur Advantage and the Market's Blind Spots
My transition to consulting was driven by the desire to solve new problems and work on the big picture evolution of risk management, which was constrained by being loyal to one corporate bottom line. The feeling of freedom now comes from being able to look at the entire ecosystem—the technologies, insurers, brokers, and end users—through multiple lenses. I can advise a large competitor I couldn't have spoken to before, which broadens my impact exponentially.
In this new role, I've identified the following clear blind spots across the market.
The future of risk management is not just about writing better insurance policies or processing claims faster; it is about embracing innovation as an organizational necessity. The technology is rapidly advancing, offering tools like AI and decentralized architectures that can genuinely transform insurance from a necessary evil to a highly valued service that provides peace of mind.
To achieve this transformation, we must maintain a relentless curiosity, adopt an AI-first mindset, and recognize that data quality is the foundational element that supports every successful change. Ultimately, to truly innovate risk management, we have to recognize the financial and cultural cost of stagnation. Betting on calculated risk, coupled with courage and strategy, will always yield a higher return than simply standing still and waiting for the world to change around you.
Opinions expressed in Expert Commentary articles are those of the author and are not necessarily held by the author's employer or IRMI. Expert Commentary articles and other IRMI Online content do not purport to provide legal, accounting, or other professional advice or opinion. If such advice is needed, consult with your attorney, accountant, or other qualified adviser.