The Dashboard Measures the Tree. Your CEO Inherits the Forest.

Charles Reeves hired me as a UX architect into Aviva's Digital Garage in Hoxton Square in 2015. Reeves had spent three years running user experience design for Activision, the studio behind Call of Duty. Aviva pulled him across industries to build its first product organisation from ten people to more than a hundred. reevesdesign The appetite above him was not subtle. Aviva's chief executive, Mark Wilson, told journalists at the Garage that the outpost existed to "compete and cannibalise" the rest of a 321-year-old insurer before some outsider did it for free. businessinsider

Eighteen months in, I was promoted to product manager for Aviva Drive, the UK's first smartphone telematics app. It used your phone's GPS to score how you actually drove, then priced your insurance from that score instead of your postcode. It had launched in November 2012, before I joined, and had already taken Apple's "App of the Week" and beaten its first-year download target three times over with 200,000 downloads in six months. marketingsociety My job was the next chapter. Under the relaunch I led, Aviva Drive passed a million downloads in about six weeks. Four in ten users who completed it qualified for a discount, and the safest of them saved an average of £101 on their premium. aviva-2014 Perception of Aviva as an innovative brand rose 33 points, and finance told the room the whole programme would turn a profit inside two years, a payback speed one internal reviewer called phenomenal. marketingsociety

By every dashboard I had access to, Aviva Drive was a win. I was reading the tree. The forest was on fire, and I would not see the smoke for another seven years.

The Dashboard Only Shows You the Tree

I sat in product reviews celebrating a million downloads. I presented OKRs on retention and Net Promoter Score to a room that nodded along. I never once asked who owned the telematics platform underneath the app. That meant the GPS scoring engine, the claims systems it fed, and the underwriting model that priced any given score. That stack, not the app on the driver's phone, is the coordination layer where an insurer's advantage either compounds or evaporates.

The 33-point brand lift and the download chart measured the interface. Neither measured whether a rival could license the identical scoring engine from the same handful of vendors. A rival could deploy it in eighteen months and undercut Aviva on price without ever building a consumer app of its own. That question sat one layer below my roadmap, and nothing on my roadmap was built to ask it.

The Window Closes While the Dashboard Stays Green

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

There is a precedent for how fast a structural window can shut once the people who saw it are gone. In August 1940, a handful of German bombers hit four of Britain's coastal radar stations. Three were knocked out for six hours and back on air by evening. Göring judged the raids not worth repeating and told the Luftwaffe to leave the radar chain alone. He never grasped that it was the one system holding the RAF's whole air defence together. newworldencyclopedia He had estimated fourteen days to clear the skies for invasion. He got one afternoon of half-hearted bombing, decided the target was not worth the fuel, and turned the Luftwaffe toward London instead. The coordination advantage he dismissed as unimportant never came back into play for the rest of the battle.

I left Aviva before the Garage was dissolved. I did not see Tulloch announce the job cuts. I did not watch the innovation hub get retrofitted as an operational headquarters for a business unit that does not build apps. I read about it in Insurance Age three years after I had rolled off the account. That distance is the point. The people who build the tree are rarely still in the room when someone else decides what happens to the forest.

Nobody Needed to Disrupt Aviva. Someone Just Needed to Own the Pipes.

The fear inside the Garage was a nimble insurtech eating Aviva's lunch with better app-first design. That fear did produce startups. By Miles launched pay-per-mile car insurance in 2016. It sold more than 100,000 policies through its own smartphone app, the kind of product the Garage was built to worry about. It did not disrupt Direct Line. Direct Line Group bought it in April 2023, absorbing its 50,000 customers and £26 million of premium into its own book. insurancetimes That is not a threat neutralised. That is a distribution channel purchased at a price its own founder called an exciting next stage.

Marshmallow, the other insurtech the trade press liked to hold up as the app-first disruptor, reached a million insured drivers by 2024. It posted roughly £289 million in revenue that year, growing 62 percent. sacra Against a UK motor insurance market that wrote £22.3 billion of premium the same year, that is under 2 percent. milliman McKinsey's 2024 study of UK insurtech funding explains why the disruption never scaled past that. Value chain enablers sell telematics platforms, claims software, and pricing models to insurers rather than selling policies to drivers. They took 91 percent of the money in 2024, up from 25 percent in 2021. Full-stack insurance entities, the app-first challengers, fell from 75 percent of funding to 9 percent. mckinsey Capital had already worked out that the money was in the pipes, not the app.

Aviva completed its acquisition of Direct Line on 1 July 2025, creating the largest home and motor insurer in Britain. aviva-2025 Each company had held around 11 to 12 percent of the UK motor market on its own for most of the previous decade. Combined, analysts put the new group at more than a fifth. reuters-avivadirectline The app I once managed is still running, folded quietly into the MyAviva app as a feature called MyDrive. avivamydrive The product survived. The innovation hub that hired me did not. The forest, it turns out, was the infrastructure layer, and nobody needed a single disruptor to walk in and take it.

The Long View Is an Autopsy, Not a Strategy Review

Carbon monoxide has no smell and no colour. You feel a little tired, maybe. The room looks exactly as it did an hour ago. The first sensation that tells you something is wrong is frequently the last one your body is conscious enough to act on, because the gas that is supposed to warn you is also the gas putting you to sleep.

That is the part every strategy framework skips past. Mintzberg's Strategy Safari tells you to step back and see the whole elephant. Amara's Law tells you to wait, because the long run always looks calmer than the panic of the short one. Both assume you get to choose when to zoom out. You do not get to choose that any more than a sleeping person gets to choose when to open a window. By the time the McKinsey chart or the acquisition headline arrives, the room has already changed. The long view everyone recommends turns out to be an autopsy, written after the fact, not a strategy review you could have called in time.

The Case for Optimising What You Can Measure Is Genuinely Strong

Let me give that fairest hearing, because it is not a weak position. BJ Fogg's Tiny Habits argues that felt success at small scale is what builds the momentum to keep going at all. Bill Aulet's Disciplined Entrepreneurship exists because a structured, twenty-four-step process beats a romantic bet on vision every time founders actually test it. Mintzberg's own elephant fable cuts both ways. You have to touch the trunk up close before you can say anything true about the whole animal. Macro vision with no micro execution is just theatre in a boardroom. When bandwidth is scarce and the roadmap is due Friday, shipping the metric in front of you is often the only rational move available.

The limit is not that the metric is fake. Amy Edmondson argues, in her 2018 book The Fearless Organization, that honest measurement needs someone willing to ask a harder question. Who profits from the gap between the number you can see and the structure you cannot? In most companies nobody is paid to ask that question. Morgan Housel names the timing problem directly in his 2020 book The Psychology of Money. Progress happens too slowly to notice, but setbacks happen too quickly to ignore. My tree compounded in press releases and OKR decks across five quiet years. The Garage burned in a single investor day, eight months after the chief executive who built it had already gone.

I controlled neither the lens nor the clock on Aviva Drive; every metric stayed green in October 2018. Wilson left that month; Tulloch dissolved the Garage eight months later, and I read about the cuts three years after I had rolled off. I still keep Apple's "App of the Week" screenshot for when imposter syndrome bites; I never open the McKinsey chart on infrastructure funding.