Why it is not always obvious who is in the room
I had not considered that the reason ships will not risk the Straits of Hormuz in the current situation, is not down to military advice, but the inability to secure insurance.
Often when starting a project we think about how it will affect stakeholders, and who might be non-obvious stakeholders with unexpected motivations. As a news-watching observer of geopolitics I might have presumed only nation states, their militaries and diplomats, would determine progress and outcomes. To learn that insurance companies are involved is, once I hear it, obvious. But it would not have occurred to me, I think, without reporters telling me.
This highlights the need to think broadly, speak to people and understand what they tell us, when in the early stages of project planning. Listen to that quiet comment about how a change to an accountancy package might affect contractor payment schedules and risk labour disputes. Or how your PC game becomes more playable if it can be paused when called away, saving hundreds of uninstalls by angry parents. Building wearable devices which allow your customer to monitor the people around them, forgetting to consider those people as stakeholders too with their own privacy needs and desires affecting your project’s perception.
Who would have considered insurance levels on a tanker could be a driver for a peace process? Well, hopefully everyone actually in the room did, but as an outsider it is far from obvious. Insurance companies are not flagged as ‘good guys’ in popular culture or common discussion. The working person might feel that insurance, often being legally required, feels like a private taxation. The stand-up comic might observe that the only people seemingly able to extract payment from the companies are fraudsters who know how to game the system. But on reflection, no matter what we think about the insurance industry, it is one of the few which is actually built on the hope that everyone lives happy and safe lives.
Have we really lowered our expectations of corporate behaviour so far that an industry which simply does not want to cause us harm, seems heroic in comparison? I digress.
The learning experience is, to listen to the quiet unexpected, and perhaps counter-intuitive, message which indicates we may have missed an important contributor to the conversation.
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