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Creativity is the driver for success

We Join the Dots

We talk endlessly about innovation. Strategies are built around it, billions are invested in it, and leaders are measured on their ability to deliver it.

But here’s the uncomfortable truth: creativity, the very spark that makes innovation possible, is consistently undervalued in our market.

We reward efficiency, scale, and execution. We create KPIs for productivity and performance. Yet we rarely measure, encourage, or protect the space for people to think differently.

Innovation doesn’t come from a dashboard or a one-day seminar at a hotel near Heathrow. It comes from creativity, the willingness to see a problem from a fresh angle, to join the dots nobody else has noticed, to imagine a future that doesn’t yet exist.

Until organisations value creativity as much as they value delivery, their innovation agendas will always fall short

Technology is not what we do, it's how we do it!

Efficiency and accuracy are important, but not as important as true change.

Creativity in insurance isn’t optional. It’s the differentiator.

The market talks constantly about innovation, yet too often equates it with technology. But most of what passes for “innovation” in insurance simply embeds existing practices more efficiently. It doesn’t reinvent them.

True innovation starts earlier. It starts with creativity, with people willing to question how things are done, challenge assumptions, and imagine better structures altogether.

Lloyd’s itself was born from creative thinking: turning uncertain risk into a tradable asset. But over time, process and compliance began to outweigh imagination.

The real progress now will come from those who can connect creativity with strategy — who can see where data, structure, and capital can be reimagined to serve the market’s future, not its past.

We enjoy helping managing agents, syndicates, brokers, MGAs and investors bring creativity back into the system, developing new models, frameworks, and innovation pathways that make the market work smarter, not just faster.

Because without creativity, technology just digitises yesterday’s habits.

Be the Rebel Bee!

Take a different path

This is Mustard's Rebel Bee.

Bees have been on this planet for over 100 million years. Modern humans? Just a few hundred thousand.

There’s a lot we can learn from them.

Take the waggle dance. It's the way a foraging bee tells others where to find food.

But here’s the twist, not every bee follows the dance. Most take direction from it, yet a small minority ignore the signal and explore elsewhere. Those few rebels are vital. They stop the colony from chasing the same patch of flowers until it’s bare.

Many businesses work the same way. The majority keep things efficient, following process and data. But the creatives, the ones who ask “what if?” or take a different path, bring adaptability and resilience.

Without them, a business becomes efficient but blind.

With them, it stays curious, alert, and alive to new ideas.

Every team needs its creative bees.

If you're an underwriter, should AI be keeping you awake?

Maybe...but like most things, it depends.

Lloyd’s published “Learning from the best: Behaviours that drive top underwriting performance” back in 2020. You can download it here https://lnkd.in/eUKScd45 if you have absolutely nothing else to do with your day.

For everyone else, here is the real message behind the behavioural science:

The profitable underwriter is creative.
The unprofitable underwriter is procedural.

Lloyd’s wraps this in phrases like “growth mindset”. At Mustard, we like to be more direct.

The best underwriters reframe risks, design new wordings, hunt for opportunities, are clear on their appetite and get close enough to clients and their advisors to understand what their real needs are. They see technology as a lever, not a threat. They create value instead of waiting for someone to bring it to them.

The weakest underwriters do the opposite.

They wait for risks to appear, reject anything awkward, hide behind price, wording, or a vague expression of appetite and blame market conditions when the numbers turn sour.

These poor behaviours are already being replaced by AI and algorithms. Not in theory anymore, but at least where the follow market is concerned, in practice.

AI has so much to offer our sector, but what it does not have is imagination.

It cannot originate, explore, or cut a new path through legacy behaviours. That territory belongs to human underwriters who bring curiosity and invention to their work.

This is where Mustard is focusing.

Helping underwriters rediscover the part of the job that makes them valuable in the first place. The part machines cannot replicate, and the part that will define the next generation of leaders in the market.

If Lloyd's and the London market wants to stay relevant and see off the spectre of AI, it needs fewer people processing and more people imagining.

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