The Tusk Is Not the Elephant

Innovation was the word everyone in corporate Britain used in 2015, chanted the way every executive chants AI today. Banks, insurers, and telecoms were opening "garages" and "labs", racing to look like the fintech that would eat their lunch before it actually did. The structural bet was that incumbents could learn startup speed before startups learned incumbent scale. Aviva's chief executive, Mark Wilson, told journalists his outpost in Hoxton Square existed to "compete and cannibalise" the rest of a 321-year-old insurer before some outsider did it for free. businessinsider I joined that outpost, the Digital Garage, as a UX architect on a product bench that grew from ten people to more than a hundred. Everyone in the building was fighting to look like the disruptor: the app in the store, the slick interface, the press release. Nobody was fighting for the pipes underneath — the scoring engines, claims systems, and pricing models that actually set the premium and moved profit and loss.

Twelve months in, I became product manager for Aviva Drive, the UK's first smartphone telematics app: GPS scoring that priced your insurance from how you actually drove instead of your postcode. It had relaunched in 2014, before I joined the Garage. By then it had passed a million downloads in six weeks and cut the safest drivers' premiums by an average of £101. aviva-2014 Apple's "App of the Week", a 33-percentage-point rise in perception of Aviva as an innovative brand, and a payback finance called phenomenal on current trend were in the same launch window. marketingsociety-2014 I co-led a later redesign with Robin Magson, my senior product manager. Those were real local wins, still the wrong instrument for whether Aviva was compounding structural advantage.

Every dashboard I opened said the same thing: downloads climbing, a 4.5-out-of-5 on the App Store, weekly actives steady or up, and conversion from drive score to insurance quote improving month on month. The Garage was meant to see strategy whole before the core got cannibalised. Aviva Drive did not fail; the organisational model for housing innovation at Aviva did. The Garage graded us on app metrics, not on whether advantage compounded in the scoring engines, claims systems, and pricing models underneath. Henry Mintzberg opens Strategy Safari with the fable of the blind men and the elephant: each grasps one part and mistakes it for the whole. mintzberg-strategy-safari I was not blind. I had perfect visibility on the tusk. I never learned to read the body. Textbooks call it missing the forest for the trees; I was counting trees while the board measured the forest on profit and loss. A green product dashboard and a green group profit and loss are not the same scoreboard. The reckoning came later, when the sponsor left and the board stopped paying for the outpost.

The Dashboard Only Shows You the App

At a quarterly business review for Aviva Drive, a senior executive asked a perfectly legitimate question: how much of Aviva's UK motor profit and loss would shift if a rival licensed the same scoring engine and undercut us on price without ever building a consumer app. I was knee-deep in downloads, retention, and conversion. I was killing it on every metric the Garage tracked. I had no answer. With the benefit of hindsight, I did not even know his question and my dashboard were describing different animals. I filed it under above my pay grade and replied with slides on engagement, brand lift, and App Store momentum. It sounded confident. It was fluff. He was describing the elephant. I was polishing the tusk.

A rival could license the identical scoring engine from the same handful of vendors and undercut Aviva on price without ever building a consumer app of its own. They did not need an app. Every quarter I had proof we were winning anyway.

The Board Was Grading Profit and Loss

Mark Wilson stepped down as Aviva's chief executive on 9 October 2018. He had taken the job five years earlier; the board decided his turnaround had not moved the share price far enough. reuters-wilson Maurice Tulloch, who had been running Aviva's international business, was confirmed as permanent chief executive that following March. carriermanagement At his first investor day in June 2019, Tulloch announced 1,800 job cuts worldwide. He set a target to strip £300 million a year in costs by 2022. He folded what the company called the "UK digital business, housed in a former garage" into the general insurance unit. bbc That December, Aviva moved its UK personal lines headquarters into the Hoxton building that had been the Garage. insuranceage

Wilson left because the share price had lagged; my Aviva Drive dashboards were still green. In 2018 Aviva reported £3.1 billion of group operating profit, mostly from life and pensions; UK motor, where Drive lived, contributed £956 million of net earned premium, a thin slice of the group. aviva-2018-results One green app could not move that profit and loss on its own. The Garage was Wilson's incubation outpost, not general insurance's profit engine. When he left and Tulloch cut costs, folding Hoxton into personal lines was predictable: the core reclaiming a side budget, not a verdict on the product. I had already left. I read about the retrofit in Insurance Age three years later, after people grading the group on profit and loss had decided what the building was for.

Scale Won, Not Another App Trophy

The industry later proved what we missed in Hoxton. Marshmallow and By Miles were not fiction. Marshmallow passed a million insured drivers on an app-first model; By Miles sold pay-per-mile cover through its own smartphone app before Direct Line Group bought it in April 2023. sacra insurancetimes-bymiles Those were real startup wins: fast, legible, good enough to frighten every incumbent garage in London. They still did not reset the market.

Against a £22.3 billion UK motor market in 2024, even the best challengers stayed a thin slice. milliman McKinsey found where the money actually went: value chain enablers licensing identical telematics platforms to insurer after insurer took 91 percent of UK insurtech funding in 2024, up from 25 percent in 2021, while full-stack app startups fell to 9 percent. mckinsey That was the structural flaw in the innovation hype. Startups raised for consumer apps; incumbents opened garages to copy them; capital flowed to vendors who sold the same pipes to both sides. Nobody needed to out-innovate Aviva in Hoxton. They needed to own or undercut the shared stack. Aviva eventually bought scale instead of another app trophy, completing its acquisition of Direct Line in July 2025 and creating the largest home and motor insurer in Britain. reuters-avivadirectline The app I once managed still runs inside MyAviva as MyDrive. avivamydrive The product survived. The innovation hub I worked in did not.

The Case for Optimising What You Can Measure Is Genuinely Strong

Let me give the metrics-first case its fairest hearing. That 91/9 split is the hardest version. mckinsey That is why the layer underneath Aviva Drive was never proprietary; no foresight at the Garage would have let Aviva fence it off alone. When the roadmap is due Friday, shipping the metric in front of you is rational, especially when the org never wired the outpost into general insurance's profit engine. The limit is not that the local win is fake. Amy Edmondson, in her 2018 book The Fearless Organization, asks who profits from the gap between the number you can see and the structure you cannot. In most companies nobody is paid to ask. My wins compounded in press release after press release. The Garage ended in a single investor day. It required someone willing to ask, years before McKinsey published that 91/9 split, who else was already selling the same scoring engine to every other insurer in the room.

Real Is Not the Same as Winning

Aviva Drive did not fail; I kept polishing the tusk and calling it strategy, mistaking a dashboard that tracked users for a view of whether the whole animal still belonged to us. I still keep Apple's "App of the Week" screenshot. It is proof the tusk was real, and proof the tusk is not the elephant.