83% of insurance executives say they can't locate critical operational knowledge when needed.
This is the diagnostic that shows you where your knowledge actually lives.
This page shows how we assess your organisation's readiness for knowledge extraction. You'll see the four dimensions we evaluate, a synthetic case study, and what the assessment delivers. Everything here demonstrates our method in action — the same approach we'd apply to your organisation.
Insurance organisations make decisions worth millions every day. Yet the judgment behind those decisions — the accumulated wisdom, the learned instincts, the hard-won expertise — is almost never systematically captured. It exists in conversations, in experience, in relationships that could disappear tomorrow.
Your procedures manuals describe what should happen. They don't capture why experienced underwriters actually make the decisions they make. The gap between documented process and real practice is where value lives — and risk hides.
Critical decisions depend on people who "just know." That senior underwriter who can smell a bad risk. The claims handler who remembers every difficult broker relationship. Their knowledge has never been articulated, let alone systematised.
Different teams have developed different approaches. What works in marine doesn't translate to property. Tribal knowledge has created islands of expertise that don't connect. Inconsistency creates both risk and inefficiency.
You want to leverage AI. But AI can only work with what's been made explicit. If your knowledge lives in people's heads and scattered documents, AI has nothing to learn from. The foundation doesn't exist.
Most knowledge initiatives fail because they start building before they understand the terrain. They create documentation projects without knowing what knowledge exists. They implement AI tools without understanding what expertise needs to be captured.
A Readiness Assessment is the honest diagnostic that precedes transformation. It maps where your knowledge actually lives — not where you think it should be. It identifies the gaps between documented process and real practice. It surfaces the dependencies you didn't know you had.
This isn't about judging your organisation. It's about seeing it clearly enough to know where to start.
Typical insurance organisation assessment profile
Our assessment applies the same Data Socialisation approach we use for full knowledge extraction — but focused on mapping rather than capturing. We use AI as a conversational substrate to surface what your organisation knows about itself.
Learn about Data SocialisationWhat documents exist? What processes are formalised? What's in people's heads? We build the map of your knowledge terrain.
Where does documented practice diverge from real practice? What expertise has never been captured? Where are the dependencies?
Which knowledge gaps create operational risk? What happens if key people leave? Where is value most vulnerable?
What should be captured first? Which interventions create most value? What does the path to readiness look like?
Aldridge had been discussing "digital transformation" for two years. Multiple initiatives had stalled. They didn't know where to start because they didn't know what they had. The executive team suspected knowledge gaps but couldn't name them. They commissioned a Readiness Assessment before committing to larger investment.
What the assessment revealed: Aldridge's documented underwriting guidelines covered only 40% of the decisions their underwriters actually made. The remaining 60% existed as tacit knowledge — learned through experience, passed through apprenticeship, never written down.
Three senior underwriters held critical judgment for their most profitable line of business. If any two of them left simultaneously, the syndicate would lose the ability to write that class effectively. No one had named this risk before.
Their broker communication was inconsistent enough to confuse their capacity providers. Different underwriters were describing the same risk appetite in different ways. The assessment gave them a clear picture and a prioritised path forward.
A Readiness Assessment produces a living document — not a static report. Your Assessment Codex captures everything we discover and provides the foundation for whatever transformation work follows.
Learn about the Codex conceptComplete inventory of where your organisational knowledge lives — documented, tacit, and fragmented. The first clear picture of your terrain.
Detailed assessment of where documented practice diverges from real practice. Names the knowledge that should exist but doesn't.
Key person dependencies, single points of failure, knowledge vulnerabilities. The risks you didn't know you were carrying.
Prioritised recommendations for what to capture first, which gaps matter most, and what the path to full readiness looks like.
Assessment isn't a questionnaire. It's a skilled investigation conducted by someone who knows how to surface knowledge that organisations don't know they have.
An Operator spends time with your people — not auditing them, but genuinely curious about how they actually work. They notice the gap between what's documented and what's real. They ask questions that reveal expertise people didn't know was expert.
This human judgment is what makes assessment valuable. AI provides the substrate for analysis; the Operator provides the insight that transforms data into understanding.
Meet the Operator roleThe cost of not knowing where your knowledge lives compounds every day. Every key person who leaves takes understanding with them. Every inconsistency creates risk. The assessment creates the foundation for informed action.
Scope scales with organisational complexity, number of business lines assessed, and depth of analysis required. Most assessments take 4-8 weeks. Many clients use the Assessment as the entry point before committing to larger transformation work.
Discuss Your Engagement
The Readiness Assessment gives you the honest picture your organisation needs.
Whether it leads to full Succession work or targeted intervention, you'll know what you're working with.
