Stop Selling Insurance. Start Telling Its Story.

Early in my insurance career, I inherited a portfolio of nearly 2,000 Australia Post franchisees and postal delivery contractors, an unglamorous collection of small commercial insurance policies covering everything from property and liability to equipment, accident and health, and marine cargo.

Some of these policies generated premiums of barely sixty dollars, and the portfolio, which had come to us through an acquisition, needed a considerable amount of love and attention. There were errors to correct, omissions to resolve, and relationships to rebuild, so I spent much of the following year getting everything into order and, rather delightfully, getting to know the people behind those files.

My job title was Administrative Assistant, although in practice I was managing much of the program, and it was the relationships that made the work so interesting.

These weren't enormous corporations with sophisticated risk management departments. They were ordinary people running small businesses, delivering parcels, earning a living, and getting on with their lives. Many came to know me by my first name, and I came to understand that while their policies might have been worth very little to a global insurance broker, the things those policies protected were worth an enormous amount to the people who owned them.

I didn't quite have the language for it then, but I was learning something that would shape the rest of my career.

Insurance, as it turns out, is not really about insurance.

It's about people.

Somewhere along the way, we lost the plot.

The insurance industry has a recruitment problem, and goodness knows we've been talking about it for years.

We struggle to attract young people, worry about an aging workforce, lament the apparent lack of interest from successive generations, and then convene yet another discussion about how to make insurance careers more appealing.

And what do we tell them?

We talk about stability and opportunity, career progression and earning potential, entrepreneurialism, and the sheer size of an industry through which enormous amounts of money flow.

We point to successful executives and impressive companies, celebrate innovation and disruption, and talk enthusiastically about technology, market share, growth, and profitability.

None of these things is inherently unimportant, of course. People need to earn a living, businesses need to prosper, and an industry that cannot sustain itself is of little use to anyone.

But surely, surely, we can come up with a more compelling story than that.

Imagine trying to persuade a curious, idealistic young person to spend their working life in insurance, and leading with the promise that they might one day make a lot of money.

Perhaps that will appeal to some, and fair enough.

But what about the people who want their work to mean something? Who want to solve problems, contribute to their communities, protect something worth protecting, or simply understand a little more about how the world works?

We have an extraordinary story to tell those people, one that is full of human ingenuity, resilience, ambition, and occasionally astonishing acts of generosity.

And we're barely telling it.

An ancient idea with a very modern purpose.

The impulse behind insurance is almost as old as civilization itself, born of the rather inconvenient reality that misfortune is inevitable and that its consequences can be devastating.

Long before actuarial models, policy wordings, or multinational insurers, people were finding ways to share losses and obligations, recognizing that the burdens of an uncertain world might be more bearable when carried together.

Ancient systems of commerce developed mechanisms for distributing financial responsibility, and the Code of Hammurabi, dating to approximately the eighteenth century BCE, is among the early records of rules governing debt, commerce, and obligation.

Modern insurance would take many centuries to develop, of course, but the underlying human problem was already there, waiting to be solved.

How do we carry risks too great for one person to bear alone? How do we make it possible for people to build, trade, travel, create, and undertake things that might otherwise be too dangerous?

And how, in a world where none of us can know what tomorrow might bring, do we find ways to protect one another against the unpredictable?

At its heart, insurance is a remarkable expression of collective ingenuity, a system through which we pool resources, distribute risk, and create the possibility of recovery when something goes terribly wrong.

It's a practical arrangement, certainly, but I find something rather beautiful in the idea that we have spent centuries devising ways to soften the blows of an uncertain world.

It speaks to something deeply human: our recognition that we are vulnerable, that the future is unknowable, and that we are better equipped to face it together.

What a fascinating foundation for an industry.

And yet, somewhere between that ancient impulse and today's quarterly financial reports, we've managed to make the whole thing sound rather dull.

The policy is not the point.

Consider, for a moment, what insurance actually makes possible.

A family takes on a mortgage and creates a home. A tradesperson invests in tools, a vehicle, and the beginnings of a business. An entrepreneur signs a lease, hires employees, and takes a chance on an idea that has been quietly taking shape for years.

A community organization opens its doors, a manufacturer sends products across an ocean, a farmer plants a crop, and a contractor undertakes a project that will become part of the landscape for generations.

Behind each of these decisions is an acceptance of uncertainty, a willingness to step into a future that cannot be guaranteed.

And somewhere in the background, often unnoticed until the worst happens, is insurance.

Not as the reason these things exist, but as one of the mechanisms that makes taking those risks possible.

We protect livelihoods, not simply revenue, and we protect the capacity to recover, not merely the replacement cost of damaged property. We help preserve the conditions under which people can continue to work, build, employ, contribute, and dream.

Of course, insurance doesn't always deliver on that promise, and I would be doing the profession no favours by pretending otherwise.

Coverage has limitations, claims are contested, mistakes happen, and sometimes the people who most need protection discover that what they believed they had purchased is not quite what their policy actually provides.

Those failures matter enormously, and not simply because of the financial consequences, but because of the trust that has been placed in us.

In fact, they matter precisely because the purpose of insurance is so important.

The higher the promise, the greater our responsibility to honour it.

We need to remember who we're working for.

Over the years, I've worked with clients ranging from individual contractors to global corporations, and I've found myself immersed in complicated placements, difficult coverage questions, and the occasional problem that required a rather extraordinary amount of ingenuity to resolve.

I've come to appreciate the technical intricacies of this profession, and I confess that a beautifully constructed insurance program can be a thing of genuine intellectual satisfaction, although I appreciate this is not a universally shared enthusiasm.

But the technical work is never the whole story, and it would be a terrible shame if we allowed ourselves to forget that.

Behind every submission is someone trying to accomplish something. Behind every policy is an exposure that could interrupt or destroy it, and behind every claim is a person or organization confronting consequences they may never have imagined.

Our responsibility is to understand that context, to look beyond the transaction and consider what is actually at stake.

The smallest account in a broker's portfolio may represent the entirety of someone's livelihood, while the most sophisticated corporate placement may ultimately come down to the very same question: when something goes wrong, will the protection we've arranged do what it was intended to do?

That is a serious responsibility, but it's also a deeply interesting one.

Insurance requires curiosity about people, businesses, systems, human behaviour, and the innumerable ways things can go wrong. It rewards judgement, creativity, analytical thinking, and the ability to anticipate consequences, often long before anyone else has thought to consider them.

It sits at the intersection of commerce, law, engineering, economics, psychology, and human ambition, and you can spend an entire career in this industry without ever running out of things to learn.

Why on earth aren't we leading with that?

Tell a better story.

I would love to see the insurance industry become more ambitious about how it presents itself, not simply more sophisticated in its marketing or louder in its recruitment campaigns, but more imaginative, more curious, and perhaps a little more willing to talk about the things that really matter.

Tell young people about the businesses that survived disasters because someone had the foresight to arrange proper protection, and about the communities that rebuilt when it seemed there was nothing left to rebuild.

Tell them about the livelihoods that were preserved, the risks that became possible, and the problems that required extraordinary ingenuity to solve.

Tell them about the failures, too, because those stories are just as important. Tell them about the consequences of poor judgement, misplaced confidence, and promises that weren't kept, and about what it takes to make things right.

Let them see the complexity, the stakes, and the humanity of it all.

Show them that this is a profession in which their decisions can have real consequences for other people's lives, because it is, and that is something worth taking seriously.

And perhaps, while we're telling that story to the next generation, we might remind ourselves why our own work matters.

I think back to those Australia Post franchisees, the little policies and the ordinary people behind them, and how much I enjoyed getting to know the people whose livelihoods were tucked away in those files.

I had no idea then that I was beginning a career that would take me across countries, organizations, and some extraordinarily complicated corners of the insurance world, but I knew that the people I was helping mattered.

That turned out to be a pretty good place to start.

We don't need to make insurance sound more glamorous than it is, or dress it up as something it isn't.

We simply need to remember what it's for.

And then, for heaven's sake, tell people about it.