Insurance is the only industry I work with where measurement is not a support function. It is the product. Your members turn uncertainty into a number and sell the number.
Which makes the blind spot more interesting, not less.
The industry that measures everything except itself
An underwriter will model a risk to four decimal places and then work inside an organisation that has never seriously measured how long a claim decision takes, or how often a broker relationship survives a bad quarter, or what proportion of renewals are automatic rather than chosen.
Not through incompetence. Through incentive. The industry got extremely good at measuring things it can price, and correspondingly incurious about things it cannot.
Ask a room of insurance professionals which of their internal numbers actually predicts a good year and you will get a long pause. That pause is the most valuable thing that will happen at your conference.
If a session produces a room full of people who cannot immediately answer a question about their own work, it is doing something a market update cannot. Book for the pause.
Three things that are unprogrammed
The trust number
Every insurer says the claim experience is the moment of truth and almost none present internal data about it at an industry event. It is treated as a competitive secret, which is convenient, because it is also uncomfortable.
The demographic cliff in the workforce
Underwriting expertise sits disproportionately with people close to retirement, and the transfer of that judgement to a generation that will work alongside models rather than ledgers is a measurement problem nobody owns.
The second-order climate question
Your members price climate risk already. What they do not discuss publicly is what happens to a book of business in places that are becoming difficult to insure at any price, and what an association is willing to say about that.
Why an outsider can raise these
Not because an outsider knows more. Because an outsider can ask a question that would cost a member something to ask.
I came to this from cancer genetics and then a decade in enterprise software, and I now work on carbon data, which is the least loved dataset in existence. The transferable part is not subject expertise. It is a method for taking a number a room has stopped seeing and making it visible again.
In an industry this numerate, that method has more to work with, not less. There is a fuller version on my insurance page.
A shape for the agenda
| Slot | Job |
|---|---|
| Opening | Association business and the market picture. Short. |
| Morning keynote | Outside voice on a number the industry avoids |
| Accredited sessions | Technical depth, credit-bearing, unchanged |
| Day two opening | The workforce and knowledge transfer question |
| Closing | Something specific enough to do next week |
What to avoid
- A keynote explaining what data is to people who model for a living.
- Insurtech disruption decks from speakers who have never handled a claim.
- Climate framed as awareness. This audience is past that and will resent it.
- Any session that could be given, unchanged, to a banking audience.
The questions worth asking a speaker will surface most of that in one call.
Frequently asked questions
Our members are actuaries and underwriters. Will a data keynote insult them?
Only if it explains what data is. The session that works with technically strong audiences is not about data literacy, it is about attention: which of the many things you could model actually gets acted on, and why the others do not. That is a question of organisational behaviour, and it is one your members rarely get to discuss out loud.
Should we programme climate risk?
Your members already price it, so a session explaining that climate is a risk will land badly. What is unprogrammed is the second-order version: what happens to a book of business in regions becoming uninsurable, and what an association says publicly about that.
Continuing education credits limit what we can programme. Does that rule out a keynote?
No, but it does mean the keynote should sit outside the credit-bearing sessions and do a different job. Use it to open or close. Trying to make one session both accredited and transformative usually produces neither.
Our conference has run the same format for a decade. Where do we start?
With one slot, not the whole agenda. Pick the session with the worst feedback, define what it is actually for, and book against that definition. Redesigning an entire programme in one year rarely survives the committee.
Sources: ProSpeakers - 2026 speaker cost and booking context · Executive Speakers Bureau - questions planners should ask