Former QBE Deputy Chair John M Green says insurance industry professionals should read and watch drama to ignite their imaginations and better foresee risk. 

A failure to fully imagine potential threat scenarios should be thought of as a key business risk, says Mr Green, who is now a writer of thriller novels. 

While risk professional training is about rationality and logic, not imagination, Mr Green says “using both competencies in each of my worlds helps me to be more effective at both: a better director, a better thriller writer”. 

“Thinking like a thriller writer has helped me in the boardroom and thinking like a director has helped me as a novelist,” he told the All Actuaries Summit in the Gold Coast last week. “We should all consider elevating failure of imagination as a key business risk.” 

Mr Green says he wakes at 4am daily, a "very clean period of time where I can let my imagination flow”. Fiction can teach empathy and how to profit from or thwart unexpected scenarios and is “as important a tool as your technical prowess”. 

“I read a lot and I encourage curiosity and reading and watching TV shows across a wide range of things that you wouldn't ordinarily read ... from the point of view of am I picking up something here that I hadn't thought of? 

“Think differently, think more openly and creatively. You might find that you're protecting yourself, your organisation much more strongly than your competitors and when the proverbial hits the fan, they go down and you don't. This is really about making your own organisations more resilient.”  

Actuaries and risk professionals should "allow ourselves to be seemingly irrational, seemingly illogical ... intentionally opening up our minds to challenge received wisdom and even our own intuition,” Mr Green said. 

The September 11 2001 terrorist attacks in the US were an example of an event that stemmed from a failure of imagination at intelligence agencies, he said. 

“If you can think of this scenario, maybe it can happen. Maybe that scenario is worth spending some time on and thinking about from a mitigation point of view. Learn to expect the unexpected work on how to profit from it or preempt it. It takes courage – go ahead and do ask those dumb questions.” 

Actuary and Finity Director Estelle Pearson also addressed Summit attendees, saying risk professionals must look for “frailties,” for example covid’s exposure of dependency on supply chains. 

She urged actuaries to work in multidisciplinary teams with security, medical and other experts as “our systems are complex and we often only understand quite a narrow part of the system”. 

Large insurance events such as asbestos and covid "were all risks that people knew about but ... no one imagined it would be as bad as the actual outcome was. It was only when the claims started coming in,” she said. 

"The tails are getting fatter because of the level of connectivity and dependence that we have. We need to have diverse and challenging thinking.”