Where does your picture of 2029 start?

Photo by Matthew Dlr

Every so often a client brings you a question that fits badly with what you sell. The client is still working the issue out, so the question arrives with no clear assignment, no price, and no place in the portfolio. Questions of that kind often settle what you'll be worth to the client a few years later.

Below is one example: what came of taking such a question on, and what it asked of the people doing the work.

A city with sustainability ambitions went looking for partners who could think along. One of the parties that joined was its insurer.

Claims and settlements never come up at a table like that.

Nothing on the city's agenda fit inside existing coverage.

The city wanted to build with timber, because concrete and steel carry too much embedded carbon. It planned to electrify its fleet, and charging infrastructure downtown poses a different problem from swapping out vehicles. And one question kept executives up at night: what happens when the city meets its climate targets too late.

The climate question is the youngest of the three. Ever since courts proved willing to enforce climate targets, the legal ground has kept shifting. Anyone carrying final responsibility therefore faces a risk with no claims history, no clear size, and no precedent to lean on. Almost everything else reaching that desk arrives as a number, and climate liability resists becoming one.

What happened to the role

An insurer has always been a safety net: something goes wrong, someone determines the cost, and the insurer pays the bill. Insurers organize, measure, and sell such work well.

The city's table called for something else, namely thinking along about whether an ambition is feasible and what would make it possible. With timber, the discussion covered fire-resistant construction and who signs off on a risk the standards haven't caught up with. With climate liability, the discussion turned to how you relate to something still taking shape.

From the outside it's still insurance, while on the inside something else emerged: from financial safety net for everyday damage to enabler of public ambitions.

What stands out is that the client set the shift in motion. The city changed its agenda, and with it the question that landed on the insurer's desk.

What the example is about

A client relationship is developing here. Same firm, same people, and still the insurer became something different for the city. From the party that delivers what clients ask to the party that weighs in on whether an ambition holds up. Nobody hands out a position like that, because it grows out of moments when you contribute something no product covers.

The pattern runs wider than insurance. Wherever the product itself becomes a commodity, the question moves to the issue around it. An accountant notices it when a business owner wants to talk past the financials, a lawyer when a client asks whether to go with this vendor at all, an engineering firm when the question turns to the site itself. The substance differs by profession, the movement is the same.

Why the shift stays invisible for so long

Moments like that rarely announce themselves. Each one arrives as a request that sits just outside the offering, and a good answer always waits: the risk is hard to underwrite, we have no product for it, let's see what existing coverage allows.

The response is defensible, and it also shrinks the question back to something we're good at.

Meanwhile, the leadership agenda is full, and rightly so. This year's numbers, utilization, legislation and supervision that tightened again. Salaries depend on that agenda, and people count on getting paid at the end of the month. Whoever gives those items priority is doing the job.

And when the future does come up, it usually means the tech stack, the org structure, talent development, M&A. Every one of those topics deserves attention, and every one starts with us. Each quietly assumes the client keeps asking the same question.

What the role asks

Operational discipline helps up to a point, and other capacities matter alongside it.

It starts with hearing what's going on before a question exists. The city announced no assignment. It did publish ambitions, and someone at the insurer connected those ambitions to their own work at a moment when nothing concrete sat on the table.

Signals like that rarely arrive through a report or a market analysis. Such signals live in conversations, and they surface only once you understand enough about your client's world to notice something moving. Hearing them takes time from people who are there daily, and a place where what they hear actually lands.

It also takes the habit of bringing together parties who rarely seek each other out. The fire department, the builders, the city, and the insurer all sit in the same place and rarely at the same table. Whoever creates that table delivers value before anyone says anything substantive.

And it takes stamina to work without an assignment and without sight of the outcome. With standard coverage everyone knows what the insurer delivers, while here the contribution takes shape along the way, which unsettles people used to producing results. The work also calls for a habit that's easy to skip: going back over what happened and what it produced, so the next round moves faster. These capacities grow by using them.

What it stirs inside the organization

A position with a client rarely changes only on the outside. Once the insurer helps weigh whether an ambition is feasible, something shifts in the house as well: which work counts, which conversation gets priority, and who gets pulled in when something important comes up.

For the colleagues who are best at the existing work, the meaning of their craft changes while that craft is still very much needed. Someone who spent years judging sharply whether a risk is insurable now hears a different question: how could the city make it insurable? Same knowledge, different use, and a different place in the conversation. A change like that runs deeper than a new way of working, because it touches what someone believes they are at work.

Underneath sit mental moves that nobody can assign. From delivering to serving, because the client wants help with something they're still figuring out. From chain to ecosystem, where your position depends less on your slot in a line of agreements and more on what you add to a whole. And from predictability to attention, because the model assumes repeatable cases while the conversation at hand asks you to notice one specific situation.

The outcome of such a change becomes visible only along the way. You can plan a new system, with a design up front and a date when it runs. A shift in position you explore rather than roll out, which is why a few places where it works deliver more than a program that tries everything at once.

What you steer on

Insurance is a predictable model, where premiums come in, claims go out, and you can calculate the ratio between them, so every effort traces back to a portfolio.

These conversations work differently. There have been a handful so far, and the time went mostly into exploring each other's positions and insights, into understanding where the other party comes from and what drives them. Only after that does the question come up of who can or wants to add what. The move runs from chain thinking to ecosystem thinking: in a chain everyone knows what they stand for, while in an ecosystem that division becomes the subject of the conversation.

What it takes is capacity. The daily operational questions need the same colleagues, and plenty of those questions come in. The insurer's leadership now asks them to contribute to something whose return nobody can estimate up front.

The shift also changes what you steer on. With a portfolio you look at results, while here only effort shows up for now: conversations held, parties met, insight gathered. Everyone paying for that work needs a different kind of patience, and the whole thing holds up only when leadership carries it.

The question that remains

Underneath the whole story sits one observation: a client's question changes more often on their side than on ours, and we notice it only when they ask something we have no answer ready for.

For the insurer it came down to a handful of conversations. Enough to see something shifting, and too little to build a way of working. The real question starts right there: how do you keep such work on the agenda alongside the numbers and the oversight, who holds the conversations next year, and where does what they hear end up?

Where does your picture of 2029 start, with what we're becoming, or with what's on our clients' agendas?