356: From the archive – Communication, Listening and Being Heard

Inga, it's very nice to see you.

Thanks for taking the time to talk to me.

You were the first female CEO at Lloyd's of London, first in its 328 years history.

Tell us a little bit about that.

What were the challenges of taking on that kind of position? I mean, it sounds, well, [laughs] for most people watching, I think that's a real tall order.

Well, Lloyd's is a very unique place, and it has a very special part to play in British history, if you like, having been around for so long, and it's totally unique in the world.

It's the only place where you can buy really, really specialist insurance, and it's been around, as you said, for over three centuries.

But it hadn't modernized itself.

It was still doing business in the same way that it had been doing it in the 17th century.

So I was basically asked to come in and introduce technology, and several of my predecessors, their attempts over several decades and millions of pounds later, their attempts had failed in the past.

So my challenge was, right, I've got to do this.

I can't do a big bang.

I'm not allowed to close this live marketplace where people, thousands of people meet every day.

I've got to keep that going, but I've got to change the way of working and introduce technology and move them away from paper.

So it was an enormous challenge, but the one I didn't anticipate so much was actually the culture change that was required because the technology, in a way, is the easy piece.

There were a few choices, several different platforms, systems you could use.

The technology was there, but you had to get the people to want to do it, to change the way they were working, and that was one of the challenges that I underestimated until I got the role.

[gentle music] So tell us a bit about how you went about doing that.

Well, first of all, I listened and listened and listened.

I had to work out why all the previous attempts had failed.

Mm.

So I spoke, personally, I spoke to hundreds of people in the market, and what's so unique about this role is that you're the CEO of Lloyd's, but you have about 1,000 employees, but you've got multiples of that, of people working for hundreds of other firms that are using the market.

You need them to change, but because they're not your employees, you can't tell them.

So I needed to try and unravel and work out why the previous attempts to introduce technology had failed, which is why I spent a lot of personal time talking, and I realized it was because we hadn't been including them.

They weren't involved in designing their own future.