In the SME projects I’m working on, a pattern has been repeating itself for months. It starts with the phrase, “Not here, not so fast.” It ends with a list of tasks that will soon no longer be needed in their current form.
A few weeks ago, I met with the management of an SME, a family-run business with twelve employees that has been in operation for three generations. We talked about artificial intelligence in day-to-day business. The owner leaned back and said the phrase that I’ve since heard in a similar form in almost every other project: “That doesn’t really affect us; it’ll all blow over.”
Four weeks later, we were sitting together again. This time, the question was no longer “if,” but rather which three positions in the company would become redundant due to automated processes, and how to break the news to the people affected.
The question of whether
Between those two meetings, the technology hadn’t changed, it was hardly any different after four weeks. What had changed was the owner’s perspective, and the question that has been on my mind ever since is a different one: Why is the first reaction to an uncomfortable development almost always defensiveness, and rarely a willingness to examine it?
A hand that refused
This case has a name that is over 150 years old. In 1847, the Viennese physician Ignaz Semmelweis demonstrated that puerperal fever could be drastically reduced as soon as doctors disinfected their hands before examining patients. The data was unequivocal: the mortality rate on his ward plummeted significantly. Nevertheless, his colleagues rejected his findings, for years, some until the end of their lives, not because the numbers were wrong, but because the discovery would have meant that they themselves, with unwashed hands, had cost patients their lives. It was easier to mock the messenger than to accept the findings.
Today, this reflexive rejection of uncomfortable evidence is called the Semmelweis reflex: the tendency not to examine a finding but to reject it immediately because it contradicts one’s own self-image. The more established someone is in their field, the stronger this reflex becomes, because the stakes are highest. It is not the knowledge that is being defended, but the identity built upon that knowledge.
That’s exactly what I see in the business owners I work with. Anyone who has successfully run a business for twenty years has every reason to trust their own judgment. The problem is that this trust makes their initial reaction to disruptive evidence predictable. It’s almost never curiosity. It’s a defensive response, politely framed as a comment about timing or pace.
What this means for the industry
The same pattern is evident in the insurance industry, only on a larger scale. Underwriting, claims processing, initial consultation: In all these areas, tools are currently being developed that can handle individual tasks faster and more cost-effectively than a human. A chatbot that provides initial information overnight. A model that pre-sorts a claim before it even reaches a claims adjuster. The initial reaction of many executives I speak with isn’t to evaluate the technology. It’s a variation on “that won’t work for us yet; our customers don’t want that.”
The current pressure to consolidate in the Swiss brokerage market shows just how costly this delay can be. Firms that invested in automated processes early on are now negotiating from a different position than those that waited to see how things would play out. Those who resist automating their own processes and only follow suit under competitive pressure lose precisely the time they would have needed to shape the change themselves, rather than simply enduring it. This applies not only to large firms. Smaller brokerage firms in particular—which tend to cling to old habits the longest because day-to-day operations leave no time for hesitation, end up under the greatest pressure when they have to catch up and keep working at the same time.
The trainable skill
I don’t believe the solution lies in uncritically adopting every new technology. That would be just as unwise as a blanket rejection, and in the end, both amount to the same kind of complacency, just in opposite directions. What matters is something else, a skill that can be cultivated: learning agility, the ability to derive actionable knowledge from new experiences more quickly than from old routines.
The paradox is this: experienced professionals, of all people, are often at a disadvantage in this regard. Their expertise has proven them right for years, so it convinces them that the old method is still sufficient. Anyone who wants to break through this must first recognize their own reaction as a reflex, not as a judgment. This is uncomfortable because it means temporarily setting aside one’s own expertise in order to be able to see something new again.
One hour per week
The project leader has since done something unusual. He asked his youngest employee, who is twenty-three years old, to spend an hour once a week showing him the new tools he has discovered on his own. No agenda, no evaluation, just watching and asking questions.
Last week he told me that, for the first time in years, he’d felt like there was something he didn’t know. He laughed as he said it, a short, dry laugh, the kind someone makes when they’ve just realized how long it’s been since they last washed their hands.
Marcus Selzer
See also: Who Asks the Leader?
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