 Hi, my name is Jerry Mikulski, and this is a love letter to the insurance industry and other industries But but as you'll see in a second the insurance industry is low-hanging fruit This all starts from an observation I had a couple years ago that most of the insurance industry operates below the joy line. So what do I mean? So picture a line I Pay you money. I don't really want to pay you for an event. I hope never materializes I actually sort of both hope it never materializes But I have in the back of my mind that you might find a little fine print that says that I don't qualify That there's a reason I can't be made whole and then I'm going to get something in return That's less than what I really originally had but but if we're all working earnestly toward the goal The goal of insurance is to make people whole So this functions as a bit of a an unspoken ceiling of our expectations We're all working below the joy line the joy line kind of limits our expectations of what might happen As we work together in the in sort of the the client and insurer relationship I don't mean that all insurance people are not joyous or that joy doesn't happen in the insurance industry This is me with a crew from Suncorp an Australian insurance company that I worked with in 2015 These were very happy people very smart people. So happiness and joy are happening in the insurance industry I'm really talking about a mental framing of the insurance industry and I'm trying to mess with that The idea came to me back around 2015 when my wife and I both became advisors to Trove Which is a startup in the Bay Area that helps you ensure valuable things and then do on-demand insurance Meaning you take a picture of your bicycle your expensive downhill bicycle And then you ensure it only during the weekend that you're out riding because when it's in the garage It's insured under your homeowners or your renters insurance for example You can also send them a picture of the barcodes on the bike or the receipt preferably on your bike in an emailed receipt And that will register it and then they know a lot about the bicycle And I suddenly got thinking well gosh now now they know an awful lot about the intimate things in your life And here comes a keyword which is everything else. I'm about to describe depends entirely on You the insurer having permission to do these things which then revolves around trust You have to have asked for permission But you really need to be a trusted party and this whole notion of operating from trust is a larger issue as you'll see as I Expand on these on these topics, but I'm in the middle of designing a process I call design from trust and this joy line idea is part of that project Joy master that everybody probably is familiar with is Zappos this funny shoe company that now sells lots more than shoes They sell wow, they empower their customer service reps Now customer service is typically the cost center that you bury in the basement and you time people to make sure that they get off The phone as quickly as possible because they are a cost to be minimized Zappos has entirely the opposite idea about the people in their call centers Those people are empowered to deliver wow to do really interesting things the story I heard Tony Shay the founder say years ago Was that he and some other executives were out of town at some conference and just for fun? They called into the call center he did not identify himself as the CEO of the company and he said you know I'd like a pizza and the rep instead of saying gosh We don't actually sell pizzas. Thanks for calling. Bye-bye said where are you and within seconds had googled The foreign googled and transmitted the information about the four nearest pizza parlors to where he was staying And he tells the story knowing that it will carry that I just told it to you and that other people will tell it because wow Is free advertising in one sense, but wow also makes people happy up and down all over the place So I'm interested in exploring that space above the joy line and to do so let's imagine that you have one of those fancy downhill expensive mountain bikes and Now let's imagine what I might help you do with that bike So you might use it more if I had a lot of permission I might notice that you haven't gone downhill biking in six months eight months And it's not just because it was winter, but you're actually not using the bike So I could with your permission Notify you that it's a great weekend for a mountain bike trip or Other provide some motivation for you in different ways that let you use it more That's kind of simple. I could also help you use that bike better. Maybe there's techniques You'd like to learn there's certainly a surfeit of videos on YouTube explaining everything including downhill biking I could hook you up with a local tutor I could connect you with other people who do mountain biking in your area a little bit of research would tell me that There's a group that meets regularly on Sundays Something like that and you could join them I could basically become a social connector for you using this object that you have that I know you have and some Permission to begin facilitating that I could help you use that bike differently You may not have heard of cycle cross yet, but cycle cross is sort of like an obstacle course while riding and carrying your bicycle across Bridges across fences and through muddy fields all sorts of things cycle crosses picking up It's an awful lot of fun, but maybe you've never heard of it So I could provide you that service and connect you up with the next cycle cross meet that's happening in your neighborhood. I Could notice that your bike is 10 15 years old and you might actually like to upgrade because you're using it a lot and I could help you then figure out what is the best path given who you are what you prefer And what I know and insurers know an awful lot about stuff. They know repair records. They know what gets stolen a lot They know a whole lot of things about stuff I could use my wisdom to help you upgrade to a better bike I could also help you put your bike in the sharing economy so that other people could benefit from the existence of your bike And maybe you're not riding it as much as you'd like because you're traveling a whole lot And you'd like to meet other people who borrow your bike and put it back So that could be pretty interesting. I could also help you sell it Let's say you haven't used it in a long time and it's sitting in your garage So in the back of your head, there's this constant loop of man somebody's just going to break in and steal it Stuff is beginning. We're beginning to realize as we're getting past the idea that we're mere consumers We're beginning to realize that stuff weighs us down and getting rid of stuff is good And again an insurance company knows a lot about The object I have so you might help me price it sell it put you could easily create a very beautiful post I could put on Craigslist or someplace else and we could sell it in a really nice way or I could gift it and by this I don't mean necessarily to donate it to some charity, which is a really great thing to do But also I mean when you die is your bike or whatever this thing is that that you value a lot Is it in your will and whom would you like to bequeath it to? So now we're opening up a whole different conversation, right? so All these things I just mentioned open up a ton of new opportunities for Conversations with your client and formerly your touch point was let's see. I'm shopping for insurance then At some point I decide to buy it and I buy from you and now I have an onboarding process Which is more or less complicated and then you talk to me once a year for the renewal Which I'm not that eager to pay and I've probably put on autopay anyway, so that conversation goes away I don't really want your newsletter your your normal every everybody newsletter and then Incidents show up and if you are a really great insurer Both of us leave that that incident smiling because it got handled very professionally very quickly and very fairly But that isn't always the case so we kind of rue the incidents now We have opportunities to be in front of you with reminders to help you improve your lifestyle To connect you with trainers and tutors or provide some tutoring ourselves on some of the most used items use this the 80-20 rule here The Pareto principle To connect you with other people who care about the things you care about Maybe to be a very relevant news feed within particular bounds or to connect you up with somebody who is a terrific news feed about Cycle Cross for example To be your host and guide into the sharing economy to make product recommendations price evaluations Estate planning right this is all some of these things are in other forms of insurance some of these are other businesses altogether So all the benefits I just named are immediate benefits for clients And it turns out that you can make a little two by two and do immediate benefits also for the insurance company itself and Higher order benefits for clients and insurers which will become clear in a sec when I got there But first let's go to immediate benefits for insurers which include as I just described many new Touchpoints so all of a sudden you have all these new conversations that can lead to new business ideas for you things that your customers actually Would like to have that you can then deliver could lead to a whole series of new partnerships because you don't have to be all the Things that I just talked about there are entities out there that exist that are doing this the sharing economy that are doing Collective ride bicycle rides etc. Etc. You can be a bridge builder between these but you can make those bridges actually partnerships All of this creates new meaning purpose fun play Improves morale for your your particular your employees And I think this is really important is that is that making people whole is good You're always sort of breaking that you're fixing the thing that's broken, but actually rethinking it so that your role is to Suddenly is loaded with a lot more meaning and purpose is really inspiring and suddenly you get intrinsic motivation that you didn't have before So this kind of improves life for insurers as well as clients now Higher order. What do I mean? Well? You are now you the insurer are now helping hack my happiness. You're trying to improve my subjective well-being That's truly interesting and you haven't really been doing that before now You're helping me possibly find my tribe my group connect with others. You're helping me pass my things on well Which is a state planning you're helping me learn what enough might mean for me now? Everybody might not be into it Some people are more of the mode of he who dies with the most toys wins and that certainly makes for more insurable objects That's true, but a whole bunch of people are starting to figure out that stuff weighs us down That there's this sort of open loop in the back of your head about somebody's going to steal it Or I don't use it enough you feel either guilt or fear around it so What does it mean to have enough and I think pondering this word enough is really interesting because it involves lifestyle change It involves reevaluating the things you have. This is a very deep conversation. So Some of your clients are really going to enjoy this conversation about what does enough mean and that will let you enter other kinds of relationships with them For insurers the higher order benefits are really you're reframing the entire insurance industry Which formerly ended where the joy line is and now includes a lot of higher higher space space where you can invent new things You are now aligning yourself with your clients higher needs their higher order needs Like hacking their happiness you are now pulling on that rope in the same direction together. That's really interesting Your employees now hopefully have a new sense of agency They have a lot more authority to do things to bring wow to bring joy to the clients at the other end So here's the the quadrant here's all four of the sections that we've just gone through it's it's a lot of things, right? It's a lot of new territory. In fact, a lot of this isn't just about insurance I think that this is possibly about how to use stuff better in your life, and it's not just stuff So some important notes First you have to get permission permission is mandatory. Otherwise, this is stalking. You've heard of the stalker economy Well, we are nose-deep in the stalker economy already. Just look at the Facebook and Cambridge Analytica fiasco look at what China is doing With their social credit system. We are already well into the stalking economy Which is a pretty big breach of faith and trust so permission is really essential here That means also that you have to be quite trustworthy So you need to do an internal audit an internal inspection figure out where do you breach trust? What are the things that you might be doing that you don't even realize breach trust like Advertising and I've got some videos online to talk about that The things you've been doing below the joy line still really matter everybody sort of below decks in the engine room fulfilling claims Doing estimates of risk estimates to all those kinds of things. They really still matter. In fact, you need to execute better on those sorts of things and As you've probably already started pondering this isn't just about your downhill bike or the jewelry that you're ensuring or that hustle-blad camera or that That purse that said that's worth $30,000 This is really about everything including services and look at how the insurance industry is Increasingly covering more and more things all of those things could come under the purview of this idea of working above the joy line Finally and this is sort of a maybe a subtle note, but I think it's really an important note I'm not trying to recommend new forms of emotional labor or emotional work. I'm borrowing here I'm paraphrasing early Russell Hock child who's done a lot of work on this And I hope I get it right because I'm not quite sure that I that I'm striking the same tone She would strike but Emotional labor is what happens when you climb on the plane and the flight attendant says good day, sir How was your how was your afternoon? Welcome to our flight and like they've got a big smile on their face Much of the time their job is to be happy their job is to be upbeat and project some of that enthusiasm That is emotional labor where the presence of emotions is required as part of your work Emotional work is very different emotional work is the work of attending to emotions in a group or with another person that you work with So when the assistant says, you know now is not a really good time to visit Bob He had a terrible meeting an hour ago. He's really pissed off That's emotional work You've just provided a little bit of guidance to the person coming in that the emotions are kind of rocky right now when you're in a meeting And you say, you know Susan, I noticed you haven't I haven't had an opportunity to say what you think Would you like to jump into the conversation? That's emotional work Now unfortunately in our cultures Emotional work often gets picked up by women. They're the ones who notice it more. They're the ones who take care of it more It is an unpaid aspect of work. It doesn't show up in the job description It doesn't show up in the interview and yet we all know that it happens all the time Some of these issues are pretty deep. So look for a couple of videos I'm going to produce after this one one is called stock or serve Which is about this whole idea about not stocking But what does it mean to serve? Well, and the second one is called being a trusted ally, which is I think the high ground in in trust in a marketplace so Today the insurance industry Frames things like this that that the the ceiling of our on our expectations is that I'm going to make you whole I'm going to bring you back up to where you were before this whole conversation has been about expanding that frame and Opening up a series of new opportunities of new conversations of new business possibilities really rethinking how the industry even works If we looked at health care Mostly health care is a break fix kind of kind of problem, right? There's a little bit of preventative care happening much more in other countries, but in the US Mostly you show up with something and I try to fix it So what if we worked above the joy line in health care and you can start looking at other things the example I used with Zappos was in retail. So there's plenty of opportunities in other other kinds of domains This whole presentation has been part of a larger project call I call design from trust if you want to know more about it go to design from trust calm If you'd like to join the process of designing design from trust send me an email I'll put my email in the information box below this video And I will add you to a conversational mailing list where we're figuring out what on earth this thing is but for now thanks for watching and Good luck making this happen