RGA Dubai — What Problem Framing does in a room full of insurance executives

The customer-centricity problem in insurance is structural, not attitudinal

Insurance is one of the few industries where the product is designed almost entirely without direct reference to how customers experience it. Actuarial models, regulatory requirements, and risk calculations drive product architecture. Customer experience is typically considered downstream — a distribution or communication challenge, not a design one.

This isn't a failure of intention. Most insurance professionals understand that customers matter. The structural problem is that the incentives, processes, and expertise that define the industry are built around risk, not around the people carrying it. The result is an industry that has historically been better at pricing uncertainty than at understanding the humans on the other side of the policy.

That gap has become harder to sustain. Digital-first insurers and insurtechs have demonstrated that customer experience can be a competitive differentiator even in a market defined by price and risk. Customers increasingly compare their insurance interactions against their experiences with consumer platforms — and find them wanting. And in markets like the UAE and broader Gulf region, where insurance penetration is still growing and customer habits are not yet fixed, the opportunity to establish customer-centric positioning is real but time-limited.

RGA recognized this structural gap — and decided to address it not just within their own organization, but at the industry level.

What made this engagement unusual: a cross-company room

In May 2019, RGA organized a one-day Problem Framing Workshop in Dubai in collaboration with Design Sprint Academy. What made this engagement structurally different from a typical corporate workshop was both the guest list and the scale.

The session brought together more than 30 executives from Alliance Insurance, ADNIC (Abu Dhabi National Insurance Company), and Oman Insurance — multiple companies, some of them operating in direct competition with each other, convened around a shared interest in addressing a problem none of them had fully solved. To make that scale workable, participants were organized into smaller working teams throughout the day, each team moving through the Problem Framing tools in parallel before converging on shared outputs.

That structure — large enough to represent genuine cross-organizational diversity, small enough within each team for real conversation — is what made it possible to surface meaningful divergence in how different companies understood the customer challenge, and then work toward resolution.

This is not a standard format. Problem Framing is designed for senior leadership teams within a single organization — VPs, Directors, and Heads of function aligning on a strategic problem before committing budget and direction. When the participants represent different companies with different business models, different customer segments, and different strategic priorities, that cross-organizational dimension adds a layer of complexity — and a proportionally higher value when alignment is reached.

The challenge of achieving a shared problem statement becomes harder — and more valuable. Agreement across organizations that normally operate in silos or competition requires a level of rigor and neutrality that informal conversations don't provide. Problem Framing's structured process — its insistence on evidence over opinion, on customer experience over internal assumption, on precision over generality — creates the conditions for that cross-organizational alignment to happen.

For RGA, convening this group was itself a strategic act. As a reinsurer, RGA's business depends on the health and sophistication of the primary insurers they partner with. An industry that gets better at understanding its customers is an industry that generates better risk selection and more durable products. The Problem Framing Workshop was an investment in the ecosystem, not just in one organization's internal capability.

What the workshop covered

The one-day session was structured around three interconnected tools, each addressing a different dimension of the customer understanding gap.

Empathy Mapping. The session opened with empathy mapping — a structured process for examining what customers think, feel, say, and do in relation to their insurance experience. For an industry that typically understands customers through actuarial data and claims statistics, the discipline of articulating customer experience at the human level is often genuinely unfamiliar.

Empathy mapping does something specific in a room of executives: it creates a shared reference point that isn't based on anyone's internal assumptions or positional authority. When a room is mapping what a customer actually experiences — the anxiety of making a claim, the confusion of comparing policy terms, the frustration of feeling like a number in a process designed for the company's convenience rather than theirs — the conversation shifts from strategic generality to operational specificity. That shift is harder to achieve through discussion alone.

Proto-Personas. The second tool moved from experience to representation. Proto-personas are semi-structured profiles of customer archetypes — not based on demographic segmentation but on goals, behaviors, and the specific problems that drive someone toward (or away from) an insurance product.

For insurance executives accustomed to thinking in segments defined by age, risk profile, and product category, building proto-personas requires a reorientation: from who this customer is to what this customer is trying to accomplish and what prevents them from doing it. That reorientation is not trivial. It repositions the customer from a risk unit to be priced into a person with a specific need that a product either addresses well or doesn't.

Customer-Centric Problem Statements. The third component — and the core output of the day — was the construction of problem statements framed from the customer's perspective. A customer-centric problem statement is not a description of what the company needs to do. It's a precise articulation of what the customer needs that the current offering fails to provide, and why that gap exists.

For the executives in Dubai, producing these statements required integrating the empathy mapping and persona work into a single, actionable definition of the problem worth solving. That integration is where the day's real work happened — and where the divergences between participants' mental models of "the customer problem" became visible and productive rather than remaining as unexamined assumptions.

What the session produced

One of the most significant outcomes of the RGA session was speed: a single structured day replaced what would otherwise have been months of traditional stakeholder meetings. That's not a marketing claim — it's a description of what changes when the right people are in the same room with the right process, rather than working through the same problem in separate conversations that never quite converge.

In insurance, stakeholder alignment typically happens through a slow accumulation of bilateral conversations, committee reviews, and formal approval processes. Each step is designed to manage risk — political, reputational, regulatory — rather than to produce the fastest or clearest shared understanding. The result is that decisions that require input from multiple senior stakeholders routinely take far longer than the underlying complexity warrants.

A structured Problem Framing session compresses that timeline by doing something those bilateral processes don't: putting all the relevant stakeholders in the same room, with the same structured process, working on the same defined problem at the same time. The alignment that typically accumulates across months of separate conversations happens in a single day because the process prevents the fragmentation that makes parallel conversations slow.

Three specific outcomes were reported from the RGA session.

Enhanced alignment. Executives who arrived with different organizational perspectives and different implicit definitions of "the customer problem" left with a shared problem statement. That shared statement didn't require anyone to abandon their organizational position — it required them to converge on a definition of the customer challenge that all positions could recognize as accurate. That convergence is qualitatively different from consensus, which often papers over disagreement. A shared problem statement that has been stress-tested through a structured process is more durable.

Customer-centric solution orientation. The shift from product-led to customer-led thinking doesn't happen through advocacy. It happens when the problems being solved are defined in customer terms rather than product or process terms. By the end of the day, participants were working with problem statements anchored in customer experience rather than operational convention — which changes what solutions are considered relevant.

Accelerated decision-making. When the problem is clearly defined and the relevant stakeholders have participated in defining it, the range of reasonable responses narrows. Decisions that would previously have required extensive re-explanation and re-alignment at each stage can move faster because the foundational understanding is shared. The compression of the alignment timeline is not a shortcut — it's what happens when the right people do the right work together at the start.

Why Problem Framing is built for this room

Problem Framing is not a team-level tool that happens to work with executives. It is designed for senior leadership altitude — for VPs, Directors, and Heads of function who need to align on a strategic problem before committing budget, teams, and direction to a response.

The RGA session operated at that same altitude with 30+ participants, structured into parallel working teams to keep the quality of conversation high while covering the full cross-organizational spread. The seniority in the room didn't require the method to be adapted — Problem Framing is built for decision-makers with real authority, real stakes, and genuine divergence in how they understand the problem. The scale required the format to be organized accordingly, but the method itself held.

What the RGA engagement added that a single-organization session typically doesn't have is the cross-company dimension. When the senior leaders in the room represent different organizations rather than different functions within one, the challenge of reaching a shared problem statement is harder — but the value of reaching it is proportionally higher. A problem statement that multiple companies have stress-tested and agreed on is a more durable foundation for industry-level action than one produced inside a single organization's perspective.

For RGA as a reinsurer — whose business depends on the sophistication of the primary insurers it partners with — that cross-organizational shared understanding was the point.

What this means if you're considering a Problem Framing Workshop

Problem Framing is built for senior leadership conversations — the moments when a VP, Director, or Head of function needs to align stakeholders and commit to a direction before teams, budgets, and technology are deployed. The RGA case extends that into cross-organizational territory: the same method, the same structured tools, applied to a room where the decision-makers represent different companies rather than different functions within one.

What both formats share is the core value: replacing the slow, fragile alignment that accumulates through bilateral conversations and committee reviews with a single structured day that produces a shared problem statement everyone has participated in constructing.

In industries like insurance, where the default process for achieving senior-level alignment is long, expensive, and often inconclusive, that compression matters. A one-day Problem Framing Workshop doesn't eliminate the need for subsequent decisions and actions. What it eliminates is the weeks or months of prior conversation required to establish a shared understanding of the problem those decisions are responding to.

For senior leaders considering this kind of engagement, the question worth asking is not "how much time will this take?" but "how much time are we currently spending trying to reach an alignment we haven't yet achieved?" The answer to the second question usually makes the investment in a structured day look straightforward.