Critical Thinking for Property & Casualty Underwriters

In a world filled with endless distractions, it's becoming increasingly difficult to focus on what's most important, especially in the world of P&C professionals. With tough challenges present every day, now more than ever is it important to think critically. But how do you do that? Don't worry, Regina Kirwan, CMO of GenStar and Genesis, has you covered! Regina was kind enough to let us feature this excellent piece, explaining how critical thinking can help insurance professionals flourish in any environment.

People may assume critical thinking, the ability to objectively analyze and evaluate an issue, comes to us naturally. Yet most would also agree that our thinking is biased and sometimes uninformed. For those in the Property and Casualty insurance industry, profitability depends on the quality of our thought processes and ultimately, the quality of our decisions. Better thinking … critical thinking … should, in theory, yield better decisions.

In today’s business world, multiple elements distract us from disciplined thinking. We are bombarded with input from a variety of sources, including emails, texts, data and notices. Our environment is changing as technology evolves and cyber security issues emerge. The pace of business is faster. When you consider the many internal and external factors affecting us on a daily basis, we face a constant uphill battle of managing information.

Some issues that we see in the Property and Casualty industry cause us some real critical thinking challenges just as we go about our business day:

In addition to the above, we face numerous challenges in the insurance world, including: data overload, entrenchment, herd mentality, high emotion, reliance on tools, skipping steps and unconscious bias. If we take a moment to PAUSE, we can begin to develop solutions based on probing questions that can lead to better outcomes. We use this handy feature with movies and music — why not in our business lives? Critical thinking will enable us to reach thoughtful and hopefully profitable decisions.

As Richard W. Paul, a leading expert on critical thinking theory famously said, "Critical thinking is thinking about your thinking while you’re thinking in order to make your thinking better."

Now let’s pause for a moment and think about that!

Thanks again to GenStar and Genesis for allowing us to share their wonderful blog full of great information. We hope you enjoyed it and if you would like to see more guest features, be sure to let us know!