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Incentives aren't broken. They're working exactly as designed. That's the problem. You want people to do more of something. You attach a reward to it. People do more of it. Everyone wins. Except that's not what happens. The Proxy Trap You want to improve customer satisfaction. But satisfaction is hard to measure in real time. So you pick something easier. Call handling time. Shorter calls mean more customers served, which means happier customers. Right? So you incentivise sho

I've seen months of effort poured into dashboards that nobody uses. Beautiful charts. Real time data. Colour coded everything. RAG statuses that update automatically. Drill downs into drill downs. The team glances at them in meetings, nods politely, and goes back to their spreadsheets. The problem is rarely the dashboard. It's what's being measured. The Activity Trap Most operational dashboards measure activity: Call volumes Average handling time Tasks completed Queue lengths

When most insurance operations leaders think about efficiency, their minds turn to claims handling times, call centre productivity, or quote conversion rates. Rarely does the humble payment process get the spotlight it deserves. That's a mistake. In a recent engagement with a UK motor insurer, we conducted a comprehensive diagnostic of their end-to-end payment operations. What we found was striking: fragmented ownership, outdated processes, and a collective blind spot that wa

When I started analysing touch time data for a major UK insurer's claims operation, I thought I knew what I'd find. Inefficient processes. Slow systems. Undertrained staff. The usual suspects. However, I discovered we'd been looking at the problem entirely wrong. And that misunderstanding was costing the business thousands of hours annually. The Original Hypothesis (That Turned Out to Be Wrong) Like most operational excellence projects, we started with a simple question: "How