Leveraging culture for profitable financial and risk advice
Decision makers who have a deep understanding of their businesses are more capable of responding to market, regulatory or technological shifts than those with a superficial view. Leading through change, and being able to shape future-fit insurance and investment roadmaps, were up for discussion over the two-day-long PSG Conference, held recently at Sun City, and broadcast online.
Questions to frame leadership by
Andrew Coutts, CEO at Hollard Insure, used his 20-minute presentation to pose a series of questions through which a leadership team might frame its response to change. “I am here to share a few leadership reflections that have helped Hollard when conditions did not,” he said. “These are things that we have tried to hold onto when the only thing that seemed certain was uncertainty.”
Step one is to determine which of cadence, capacity or confidence will be first to ‘break’ when your firm is faced with change or crisis. You must then determine where in the change cycle the break is likely to occur, and whether the break will show up internally, among members of your teams, or externally, at customers, partners or suppliers. Finally, you must decide how you will show up during defining moments. Coutts said the future operating environment would be more complex, and that firms’ responses to complexity were what really mattered.
Variables include how rapidly you respond to change and whether you defer to consensus or plot your own way. “We have learned that our response needs to shift from trying to predict outcomes to trying to build adaptive capability,” Coutts said. The adaptability quotient concept, also called AQ, is something this writer has encountered at various presentations in early 2026. AQ is usually positioned alongside IQ and EQ but with a stronger focus on how individuals and organisations respond when familiar assumptions no longer hold.
In simple terms, AQ is the ability to learn, unlearn and adjust at pace. It requires that leaders stay effective when customers, markets, regulation or technology move faster than the models designed to explain them. Coutts affirmed this reality, saying that predictability in the short-term insurance market was evolving, and that the traditional risk models that insurers had come to rely on had changed. Modern insurers must, for example, adapt to a world in which small trigger events cascade into significant losses.
Chaotic chain reactions
Case in point, a single cyber breach can bring down an entire supply chain; a localised weather event can cause unprecedented damage downstream; and a midnight social media post can undo a solid reputation. Another notable point is that the boundaries between industries are blurring. “Insurance intersects with banking, healthcare, logistics and technology in ways that simply did not exist a decade ago,” Coutts said. The key observation here was that the environment is changing faster than short-term insurers’ legacy models can accommodate.
The Hollard CEO said that insurers would have to reassess fragilities and response times to ensure they can make decisions for the emerging risk landscape. In this context, short-term insurers will have to rethink their foundational principles to endure through future cycles. Coutts offered up adaptive capacity as central to this approach, saying it revolved around how quickly firms can sense; how fast they can decide; how many options they create; and how well they can absorb the shocks.
What do short-term insurers need to do differently? And what principles and operational tweaks are needed to build adaptive capacity? “An important starting point is acknowledging that leadership is beginning to change,” Coutts said. It has become more difficult to lead with answers under uncertainty; solve for singular challenges; and confine leadership to narrow roles. And it is easier to be guided by enabling principles; experiment and learn; and navigate ecosystems collectively.
Foundational principles to withstand complexity
“The solution is about having clearer principles … when complexity increases … the principles matter more,” Coutts said. His recipe for success, and one that has served Hollard and its founders well over decades, includes having large, diversified portfolios; humanness augmented by technology to always put the customer first; deep care to make a difference; creating a community of partners; and achieving deep specialisation across various domains. These foundational principles can withstand market, operational, regulatory or reputational pressures.
Drilling into the ‘humanness augmented by technology’ point, Coutts warned against rapid, ill-thought tech adoption: “The human moments must matter and be better and more scalable through the utilisation of tech; it is about how we make human moments better through tech.” You can use technology to take costs out of your business and reinvent products and services provided you always put your customers first.
Commenting on a community of partners, the CEO encouraged stakeholders to think of partners as capability multipliers with shared outcomes rather than a procurement line item.”
Entrepreneurship and experimentation
Coutts singled out three guiding principles that have helped generations of decision makers lead through change at Hollard. First and foremost, culture and purpose. Second, entrepreneurship and experimentation. And third, partnership. He challenged the assembled brokers to identify one principle that their practice would not abandon regardless of the challenge or threat landscape. “In the Hollard story, culture and purpose is both the why and how of how we show up, and it needs to outlast any strategy cycle,” he said.
Shared value, something that many readers will more typically associate with another leading domestic financial services brand, cracked a mention too. “You need to start by making the client meaningfully better off,” Coutts said. “And then you build your commercial model around the behaviour points that this generates.” He added that long-term sustainability resulted from making profit a by-product of purpose. Another profit and sustainability kicker stems from compounding value with partners “with whom you share a single, measurable purpose.”
The final piece of advice was for businesses to cultivate an enabling culture. “The practical move is to clarify frameworks and guardrails in your business, and then create permission to start small without waiting for perfect information and certainty,” Coutts concluded. He called on brokers to lead the change in their practices while staying true to the foundational characteristics they would not trade away under any circumstance.
Writer’s thoughts:
Financial and risk advice practices that elevate culture and purpose, entrepreneurship and experimentation, and partnerships will find themselves on the fast track to sustainable future. Do you agree, and what foundational characteristic will your business never trade away? Please comment below, interact with us on X at @fanews_online or email us your thoughts [email protected].
