Dive In 2023: Fostering an inclusive culture

This year’s Dive In Festival brought together more than 20,000 people across the world to explore issues around equality, diversity and inclusion (EDI) in the global insurance industry.

The three-day event kicked off on 26 September with a panel of industry executives discussing the importance of company culture, which itself can only be fostered by creating inclusive teams all the way up to leadership level.

During the panel, Beazley’s chief risk officer Rob Anarfi said: “Any example of massive success, if you look behind it you will find innovation.

“And so if we want to be worthy supporters of our clients, we’re going to need to have different ideas. We can't continue to live in a world where it’s all the same ideas, same background, same thoughts. And that’s across all levels of our industry.”

Anarfi added that while firms can run initiatives to encourage the recruitment of diverse talent, people will quickly move elsewhere if it becomes apparent that this functions more as a tick-box exercise.

“You can't lie about an inclusive culture. You can tell people stories and attract them so that your diversity statistics look better, but you can't fake a good culture,” he said.

This year’s festival theme, ‘Unlocking innovation: the power of inclusion’, was focused around how EDI programmes can help to power the industry’s talent, innovation and relevance.

Mark Lomas, head of culture at Lloyd’s, explained to this publication how the rapidly evolving risk landscape, in conjunction with the increasing connectedness of society and risk, requires different perspectives and diversity of thought to create innovative, meaningful solutions.

“For me, Dive In is very much linked to not only the Lloyd’s market but the wider sector’s need to attract talent. It is also about understanding that this actually goes beyond the talent agenda,” said Lomas.

“This is about the products that keep companies sustainable in the long-term. It is not a zero-sum game. D&I is not about making people move out of the industry for different people to move in, and I think Dive In really encapsulates that inclusion is central to talent, engagement and innovation.”

Elsewhere, the festival hosted a panel examining the role of artificial intelligence in helping to identify talent when hiring and promoting to help create a more diverse workforce.

Lloyd’s senior diversity, inclusion and wellbeing manager Monica Stancu underlined how the use of AI can save time during recruitment processes by identifying people from underrepresented groups faster and more easily.

Existing use cases of AI in a business context include CV sifting, video interviews, productivity measurement and job allocation.

However, other participants on the panel voiced the common concern that the use of AI in corporate environments may unintentionally replicate and even amplify existing bias and prejudice.

Tech entrepreneur Kumardev Chatterjee explained: “Any AI system is just two things. How it is coded to behave, and the data that it is fed to learn.

“This won’t be the case forever, but at the moment an AI system is only as good as the data that it is ingesting, and it's only as good as the mechanism that it's using to ingest that data, learn from it and perform the tasks.”

This year’s Dive In Festival concluded with the unveiling of six photographic portraits by Franklyn Rodgers in the Old Library at Lloyd’s.

The D&I champions included Anarfi, as well as Kirat Kaur Nandra, credit control manager at Chubb, and Erik Johnson, MIC Global underwriter.

The exhibition also included David Flint, the first Black broker in the Lloyd’s market and chief executive of Blue Mountain, as well as Rebecca Mason, the first openly trans woman in the Lloyd’s market (currently senior wordings manager at MS Amlin), and Sheila Cameron, the first female chief executive of the Lloyd’s Market Association.