Podcast: “Rose's Renaissance": Breaking Things, Building Better, and the Risk of Being Human
Originally published by The Salty Adjuster
Listen to the Full Episode
What does innovation look like when it moves beyond ideas and buzzwords? Rose Hall joins The Salty Adjuster to talk about creating new value, knowing when to change direction, why insurers struggle with buy vs. build decisions, and what startups need to understand about selling into complex organizations. The conversation also explores career reinvention, authenticity, vulnerability, and the experiences behind Rose’s Renaissance.
Below you’ll find some of my thoughts from the conversation we got into on The Salty Adjuster, and you can listen to the full episode above.
What Innovation Means to Me
Innovation is one of those words everyone likes to use. Ask most people if they think they’re innovative and they’ll probably say yes. But wanting innovation and being willing to do what innovation requires are very different things.
My definition is pretty simple: Innovation is creating new value where it didn’t exist before.
Having a great idea isn’t enough. Putting a new piece of technology into an organization doesn’t automatically make something innovative either. You have to take the idea far enough to create value, and that requires being willing to get things wrong.
I’ve been in plenty of rooms where something isn’t working, but the response is, “We’ve already spent X amount of money. I can’t walk into that room and tell them we need to change directions.”
My response is: of course you can. In fact, you should.
If you want to innovate, you have to be comfortable trying something, learning from it and changing direction when the evidence tells you to. You should be able to walk into a room and say, “We tried this. It didn’t work. Here’s what we learned, and here’s where we’re going next.” That’s progress.
The challenge is that organizations often mark those moments as failure. You only get so many of them before somebody starts questioning the entire initiative. That makes real innovation incredibly difficult.
You Have to Be Able to Zoom In and Out
There are people who are really good at seeing the big picture - they can imagine where an organization could go, what could change or what could be created. There are other people who are excellent at the operational side. Give them the destination and they can figure out how to get there.
The magic is being able to move between both.
You have to understand the North Star, then zoom all the way into the operational tactics required to reach it.
I sit in a lot of rooms where people have great ideas. But an idea is still an idea until someone figures out how to put it into practice and create new value from it. That movement between vision and execution is where innovation becomes real.
The Insurance Buy vs. Build Question
One of the questions I come back to often in insurance technology is whether a company should build something internally or buy it from someone who has already built it.
Most insurance companies think they can build it themselves. And maybe they can, but should they?
There are plenty of situations where an insurance company may be better served doing insurance things and buying the technology it needs. There’s a lot wrapped up in the decision to build internally - there can be pride of ownership, there can be an assumption that building something yourself gives you greater control, there can also be a very different kind of accountability when you approve a large purchase from an outside technology company.
If you’re responsible for greenlighting an insurtech purchase and the investment doesn’t work, the amount spent is clear. The decision is attached to someone. Internal development can feel different. That doesn’t mean buying is always the right choice, so companies need to understand what’s driving the decision. Being capable of building something doesn’t answer whether building it is the smartest use of your resources.
A Great Product Can Still Solve the Wrong Problem
I see another version of this challenge when startups are trying to sell into large insurance organizations. A company can build something genuinely useful and still struggle to sell it. I had someone come to me with a solution designed to dramatically improve risk engineering efficiency. The risk engineers who saw it loved it - it would save them time and make their jobs easier.
The problem was that the risk engineers weren’t going to pay for it and the person several levels above them with the budget had a very different set of priorities. So my response was that the solution could be valuable and still be very difficult to sell because the problem it solved wasn’t financially meaningful enough to the person making the purchasing decision. They went out and did more market research, came back to me later, and that’s exactly what they found.
This is one of the biggest things startups need to understand when they’re selling into complex organizations: your user isn’t always your buyer. You have to understand who the stakeholders are, what they care about, what makes the investment worthwhile to them and how your solution fits into a much larger organization.
The person using your technology may love it, but that doesn’t necessarily mean they have the power to buy it.
Startups and Insurance Companies Need to Understand Each Other
Startup culture and large corporate environments operate very differently. Startups need people who understand how corporate organizations work, and insurance companies need people who understand startups. I’ve also seen people with a startup mentality working inside legacy organizations, and I think that combination can be incredibly powerful.
If you’re a founder walking into a carrier, you need to know how to navigate that organization: Who are the stakeholders? Who controls the budget? What does the person you’re speaking with need to accomplish? What matters to their leadership?
If the startup and the corporation don’t understand each other’s perspectives, the message is going to fall on deaf ears. The goal is ultimately for two organizations to do business together, so someone has to be able to speak both languages.
Why I Never Followed a Completely Linear Career Path
I graduated with an engineering degree, and engineering has a pretty clearly defined career path: you graduate with a degree in engineering, then go to a design firm or construction firm and you start as an engineer, work your way up to project manager, then a project executive. When you’re young, you look at the people ahead of you and think, “Yes, that’s where I’m going.” There’s nothing wrong with that path, mine simply didn’t stay very linear.
At one point early in my career, the president of the consulting firm I worked for asked if I could project manage something I’d never done before. I told him I could. Meanwhile, in my head, I was thinking, “You told that man what?” But I was excited by it. That’s probably one of the clearest threads throughout my career. My favorite thing to do is something I haven’t done before.
The last three roles I had at AXA XL were roles I helped create with senior leadership. I’d identify something I thought we could do better, develop an idea for what the role could accomplish, explain the value to the organization, our clients and the industry, and propose it - then I had to produce results.
Eventually I would build something, get it running and look around thinking, “What else can I break?” And I mean that in the best possible way. If something I created can operate without me, I consider that a good outcome.
At some point, that also made me think bigger. I had built things within construction, expanded that work across the Americas, and eventually I started asking how I could apply what I’d learned more broadly across the industry. How could I have a bigger influence?
That question is part of what eventually led me beyond working for one organization.
I Don’t Want People to See Only the Best Parts
My career has also changed the way I think about what we choose to share professionally. For a long time, much of what I posted publicly was analytical. Industry economics, data…the kinds of subjects people expected from me professionally. Over time, I started sharing more of myself, and my experience with long COVID was part of that.
I speak a lot, and people sometimes come up afterward and tell me how impressive they think something I’ve done is. That’s lovely to hear, but I’m very aware of what happens when we start comparing ourselves to people we admire. We compare our everyday selves to somebody else’s best day. Social media makes that incredibly easy. People see the accomplishment, the speaking engagement, the career move or whatever else someone chooses to share. They don’t necessarily see what happened underneath it.
I don’t want people looking at my life and thinking, “I could never do that.” I’d rather tell you how I did it. I’d rather tell you what went badly. I’d rather tell you what I struggled with along the way. When I shared more about long COVID, part of the reason was simple. People had seen the professional successes I was posting while having no idea what was happening underneath the surface.
Everyone is fighting something and I don’t think everyone needs to share everything. There are plenty of things that can and should remain private. I’m willing to share the parts of my experience that I think could help someone else.
Authenticity Makes Hard Conversations Easier
Authenticity is probably both one of my assets and one of my detriments. I’ve also learned how powerful authentic relationships can be professionally, I like doing business with friends, and sometimes that means friends become business partners. Sometimes business partners become friends.
When there’s an authentic relationship underneath the work, you can have difficult conversations, you can call somebody and tell them no, you can disagree, and both people can still leave the conversation understanding why the decision was the right one. That kind of relationship matters to me.
Sometimes You Find Yourself Standing Up
There was a moment at an industry conference that crystallized another part of this for me. A speaker made several discriminatory comments from the stage. I remember people around the room looking at each other as if to ask, “Did they really say that?” After several comments, I somehow found myself standing, I hadn’t planned it. I challenged what had been said, explained why I thought it was wrong and then sat down. Immediately afterward, I wondered whether I had completely overstepped, and I remember thinking, “Am I the jerk here?”
What mattered to me later was realizing that the comments hadn’t been directed at a group I personally identify with. I wasn’t standing up for myself, and I think that’s probably part of what got me out of the chair. I’m much more likely to shrug something off when it happens to me. Watching somebody else be diminished brings out a very different reaction.
I didn’t know how that moment was going to be received when I stood up. Sometimes you speak because you know exactly what the outcome will be, and sometimes you find yourself vertical because staying quiet no longer feels like an option.
Rose’s Renaissance
A lot of this is what I mean when I talk about Rose’s Renaissance. There have been career changes, new roles, consulting, advising and figuring out how I want to use the experience I’ve built across engineering, construction, insurance and innovation. There’s also been a much more personal evolution. I’m more willing to talk about what didn’t work and about the things happening underneath the accomplishments.
And I’m still interested in the same question that has followed me through most of my career: What can we do better?
Sometimes that means creating something new, sometimes it means letting go of something we’ve already spent a lot of money building, sometimes it means helping two very different organizations understand each other, and sometimes it means being willing to stand up and say something when everyone else in the room is thinking it.
