Change resilience: the competitive advantage insurers are overlooking

Insurers are under pressure to deliver constant transformation while keeping operations stable. Here’s how to build a resilient change function that can prioritise, absorb and sustain change more effectively.

The insurance industry is deep into a decade of continuous transformation. Tighter regulation, consumer scrutiny, inflation, profitability pressure, cyber risks and AI uncertainty keep widening the scope and accelerating how fast change needs to happen.

But insurers are not transforming simply to keep up. They’re also trying to grow: launching new propositions, improving customer experiences, modernising distribution and responding to market shifts.

The leaders running these programmes are sharp, commercially minded and acutely aware of what’s at stake. But in most insurers, transformation functions haven’t been designed to manage this pace and volume of change. Projects are being pushed onto teams already at capacity, and the impact and value of each investment suffers.

Our Transformation Index research points to the scale of the problem. 66% of financial services and insurance executives say employees are fatigued by continual waves of change, and just 38% say their transformation programmes succeed without hitting significant hurdles.

In other words, many insurers are asking their organisations to absorb more change than their current models can realistically support. This is why building a resilient change function should be at the top of every insurer’s agenda, and it requires more than incremental fixes.

Insurance leaders need to design operating models for the reality of the industry: constant transformation, non-negotiable regulation, carefully measured adoption and finite organisational capacity. That means rethinking how programmes are prioritised, sequenced and governed, and giving your change leaders the scope and authority to own the agenda, not just deliver against it.

Your change function can’t outperform the organisation around it

Resilience doesn’t sit inside the change function alone. You can hire the best people and invest heavily in your initiatives, but they’ll still struggle if your whole organisation lacks the conditions to support transformation.

From our experience, the most agile and well-prepared insurers share three principles:

They ringfence room to innovate
When operational teams are all working at capacity, there’s no bandwidth left to absorb change. The programmes meant to drive competitive advantage end up driving attrition. Resilient insurers design for around 80% utilisation across their teams, leaving 20% headroom to innovate and adopt new ways of working. They protect this capacity through careful sequencing and prioritisation, making deliberate trade-offs about which programmes to run and when.
Decisions are made across functions, not inside them
Within most insurers, departments are still planning transformation in silos, and nobody is stepping back to ask whether the combined programme is realistic for the year ahead. Resilient organisations set transformation objectives as a single, cross-functional team. They proactively look at the full portfolio of change and their impacts before approving new programmes, rather than stitching together what each department has already decided for itself.
Leadership listens to the frontline
Change designed entirely at executive level can fall apart when it meets the reality of regional and departmental operations, processes and compliance requirements that don’t align with the overall framework. Resilient insurers treat frontline feedback as a core input to programme design and governance. Once those conditions are in place, the change function itself can move from reacting to actually shaping it. This is where the operating model really matters.

Four ways to increase resilience in your change management model

A resilient change function operates on the front foot. Teams have a view of the full pipeline, managing the flow of demand across the enterprise and making sure the organisation has enough capacity before a programme gets the green light.

But most insurers aren’t set up this way. The change function often gets housed inside a project management office (PMO), which acts as a strong delivery partner but gets little say in whether a programme should have been approved in the first place. The result is limited portfolio visibility, weak challenge on competing priorities, and little coordination at an enterprise level.

The priority is to build a function that can see around corners, challenge demand early and help the organisation absorb change more effectively. Our experience working with global insurance providers points to four priorities for building a proactive change function.

Give change leaders a seat at the strategic table

Your change function needs a direct line to the executive team, without filtering through layers of project governance. Heads of Change should have the authority to scrutinise decisions and reprioritise programmes based on regulatory, industry and internal developments.

With that proximity to the executive team and a full view of the portfolio, they can flag where initiatives are competing for capacity and where dependencies between them create risk. They can also challenge unrealistic timelines and push for sequencing to be rethought before investments are finalised.

Assemble a cross-functional change action team

The most effective change functions we’ve seen bring strategy, communications, learning and development and change specialists together in a single team, with champions embedded across the organisation. With that breadth of expertise, transformation leaders can connect every programme to the organisation’s overarching objectives and ensure that individual initiatives work towards the same strategic goals. We’ve seen this work in practice with an insurance client that had already made five unsuccessful attempts to implement a new CRM platform.

Rather than treating the issue as a delivery problem alone, we helped build their change capability as part of the transformation itself. That included establishing a Change Centre of Excellence, alongside a practical framework, toolkit and tailored training for more than 300 employees. The result was 70% adoption in the first month, and a stronger internal capability to embed future change with more confidence.

Pilot in one market before designing the global rollout

Many of the insurers we work with run international operations where practices vary hugely across Europe, Asia, North America and Latin America. Acquisitions amplify this complexity. Teams may share a brand name but have very different cultures, systems and regulatory obligations.

A one-size-fits-all transformation strategy won’t account for these nuances. Rather than designing for global deployment from the outset, it’s better to pilot change in one region first. Get the methodology right, test it against the realities of that market, then adapt the programme as you expand to others. Done well, this approach supports initiatives that drive growth with less friction.

Invest in the capability to sustain change

Most organisations commit serious resources to design and rollout, only for teams to revert to old habits once the initial project ends.

To increase resilience, change readiness has to be an ongoing priority. That means fostering a growth mindset at every level, so that adaptability becomes instinctive rather than something imposed programme by programme. Get this right, alongside the other three elements, and your investments will reach value faster, carry less operational risk, and deliver the commercial returns your business expected when programmes were first approved.

Change resilience is the competitive advantage most insurers are missing

You can lose value at every stage of a transformation programme. A resilient change function protects both your ROI and the engagement of project delivery teams. It helps insurers sequence transformation so you can align activity around strategic objectives, course-correct while programmes are in flight, and prioritise the training and cultural commitment needed to embed change long-term.

But increasing resilience means tackling some of the biggest operational tensions in your business: how to control demand, how to prioritise ruthlessly, and how to protect capacity for innovation while keeping the day job running. It means measuring progress, listening to your teams, and creating repeatable models that translate across programmes, markets and regulatory cycles.

The reward is a change function that becomes a competitive advantage in its own right. Your programmes reach their intended outcomes faster. Your top talent contributes greater value. And your business is better prepared not only for the next acquisition, market disruption or regulatory shift, but for growth opportunities. For insurers operating in an environment of constant change, that kind of resilience is a strategic advantage.