You Don’t Know What You Don’t Know!

I was preparing a presentation titled “The Winning Edge” for a group of insurance brokers and I was thinking about the importance of data.

A small company of 20 or 30 employees generates a lot of important data – data critical to making fundamental business decisions, to determining the company’s course and to increasing productivity.

Unfortunately, much of the data is never collected and that which is received by mid- and upper-tier management is virtually useless. Why?

Because too often data is collated and reported by IT professionals for IT boffins.

Even in the boardrooms of enterprise-grade corporations, each individual board member has a different level of understanding of the information contained in a report. For example, it’s unlikely that the Head of Marketing will understand the consequences of downstream cash flow on R & D based on 200 pages of numbers, charts, graphs, circles and arrows. It’s still gibberish to that executive.

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Lights, Camera, Action

It has been a couple of weeks since my last post. During that time I have been to Alice Springs in Australia’s outback. 

For some time I have believed that “immersion” events, where the whole audience is immersed in a single conference theme is a more effective learning model than the traditional company or association conference where speaker after speaker rise to deliver their standard PowerPoint presentation.

Financial advisory group Synchron were brave enough to try my concept at their bi-annual advisers conference held in Alice Springs (in Australia’s Outback).

In brief, the conference was designed as an estate-planning scenario that reflected on a number of “real life” situations as they emerged in the life of Alice Springs trucking business owner Richard (Dicky) Goer.

In the opening scene, Dicky attends a meeting with Financial Adviser Mick Madden (played by me) following a suggestion from his wife Amanda.

Over the scenes that follow:

• Dicky is in an accident and is hospitalised
• Dicky dies and there is a funeral
• At the will reading the wife discovers that he has a very pregnant girlfriend (and they have a wonderful fight in the lawyers office)
• Dicky rises from the dead (misdiagnosed)
• Attendees present their advice based on the facts revealed as on-stage presentations.

 At each stage various “experts” are called in to give professional advice about ares such as:

• Business structures
• Powers of attorney
• Investments
• Insurance
• Insurance claims management
• Retirement funding
• Wills 

Maybe I have found a new career.

The Main Players

After the Accident - Dicky with Adviser (Yours Truly - red tie) and Lawyer

 The Funeral 

Rising from the dead