311 Institute - The Future of Insurance 2020 &Beyond

Notes:
trends - Hard and Fuzzy.
Hard Trends are just that, trends that we
know will happen but assessing when
they’ll first appear, and maybe more
crucially, when their tipping points will
take place, requires us to identify and
assess a variety of factors that include,
but are not limited to, accessibility,
affordability, cultural and generational
bias, investment patterns, technology
maturities, and the regulatory, macroeconomic
and socio-political environment.
Assess all of these factors successfully
and building your organisations new
products, services, strategy and vision
becomes a much simpler task. After all, if
you could accurately forecast the future,
including where, when and how it will
land, why wouldn’t that be an asset to
your organisation?
Autonomous vehicles, for example, from
cars, drones and semi-trucks to aircraft,
cargo ships and passenger drones are
a prime example of a hard trend - an
ascending trend that began gaining
traction, investment and regulatory
interest in earnest in 2010, just seven
years ago. We know for a fact that these
new platforms will become the de-facto
transportation standard of the future,
and consequently we can model their
implications, on culture, industry and
society, with a high degree of accuracy.
For those of you who think I’ve gone
for the easy option here I’ll flip some
more hard trends into your hat - the
ascendancy of fully autonomous
organisations, extreme life extension
services and space internet platforms,
and many more. But we’ll come to those
later.
Fuzzy trends in the meantime are trends
that might happen - a future maybe.
These trends can include, among other
things, the likelihood of new regulations,
or the uncertain, or unequal, impact
that AI will have on society and the jobs
market - and therefore on earnings, asset
ownership and, ultimately, insurance.
It’s an irrefutable fact that technology is
accelerating the world’s pace of change
but sometimes for all the forecasting we
do there will be sceptics who choose
inaction over action, and sit on the fence.
While there will always be margins of
error, and room for debate, there are
far too many corporate and government
examples of where stubborn inaction has
been damaging, or fatal. After all, no
one sets out to be the next Blackberry,
Blockbuster, Kodak or Nokia, but now
that the pace of change is accelerating
organisations will find that increasingly
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