Thursday, July 31, 2014

Disruptive thinking in financial services: first stop Cairns

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I’m not sure if Dr Michael Hewitt-Gleeson can teach me to think in under an hour at next week’s Financial Services Council (FSC) annual conference in Cairns.
But I’m willing to let him try. 
Our industry would arguably be better for consumers if more people did the same.
Next week’s annual industry gathering comes at a very interesting time. We have, as I’ve blogged before, and Deloitte called this week, reached a digital tipping point. That’s a tipping point that involves traditional financial services and wealth management business models and value chains being disrupted.
At the same time – perhaps not coincidentally – financial advice as a profession finds itself at a crossroads of sorts.
We as individual consumers want greater trust, transparency, value and less BS from the brands and individuals serving us financial solutions.
The circumstances cry out for new ways of thinking. Ways of thinking that help deliver radically better service, for less money and with greater openness about underlying business models.
So Hewitt-Gleeson’s teachings resonate right now. Here are my top five takeaways from his writing, and the things I hope most to learn more about next week.
  1. Thinking, in any situation, is escaping from your current view of the situation (cvs) and searching for a better view of the situation (bvs)
  2. The switch from cvs to bvs can be made by using something Hewitt-Gleeson calls Universal Brain Software (cvs2bvs)
  3. Using this we can switch our brains from one parallel universe to another
  4. This very moment (NOW) is a cvs – in each ‘now’ moment we can use our brains to either defend the cvs or escape it
  5. If we chose to escape then we open up the opportunity to search for (create) a better view. That better view (bvs) = cvs x10 i.e. a bvs can be ten times better than a cvs
This echoes much of the latter day positive psychology movement thinking around empowerment and creating positive future alternatives.

In short, this kind of thinking is game-changing.

It’s also what we’re all going to need to catch, and successfully surf, the wave of disruption that’s coming with digitally-enabled financial services.

This post was first published on the BlueChip blogIf you’re not going to the FSC Conference you can follow the action here (I’ll be blogging) and via @carden @FinServCouncil