Culture is the transformation: what Lloyd’s of London teaches us about lasting change

In brief

• When Dame Inga Beale became CEO of Lloyd's of London, the market handled around $50 billion of business a year on paper. Several of her predecessors had tried to digitise it and failed.

• The technology wasn't the barrier. Earlier attempts had been imposed on the market with little input from the people whose work would change.

• Inga's team spoke to thousands of people and involved them in the design. The start was slower, but workstreams later finished within budget and ahead of schedule.

• She changed the culture alongside the process. She took down the walls around the executive floor and started reverse mentoring with early-career colleagues.

• The same lesson applies to AI transformation: adoption depends on involving people and earning their trust.

When Dame Inga Beale became CEO of Lloyd’s of London, she inherited an organisation with more than three centuries of history and a transformation challenge that several predecessors had already tried to solve.

The technology problem was obvious.

Despite conducting around $50 billion of business a year, much of the Lloyd’s market still relied on physical pieces of paper passed between brokers and underwriters, wet ink stamps, photocopies and repeated manual data entry.

Digitising it should have been straightforward. It wasn’t. As Inga told our Women in Transformation Summit, the technology had never really been the problem.

“The wall of resistance was so huge I thought, I do not want to fail like my predecessors. I want to be successful.”

Her story became a powerful closing chapter to an afternoon spent discussing resilience, leadership and the human edge of AI because the lesson travels far beyond insurance. Transformation becomes difficult when we treat technology as the change and underestimate the people whose working lives we are asking to change with it.

Before changing the process, understand the resistance to change

Inga arrived at Lloyd’s with plenty of experience of digitisation. Earlier in her career she had helped digitise underwriting at GE and had subsequently led a turnaround where people readily embraced change because the alternative was business failure.

Lloyd’s was different. The market had survived wars, economic crises and more than 300 years of disruption. From the perspective of many people inside it, the existing model worked. Why change something that had been successful for centuries?

Rather than pushing harder, Inga started listening. What she discovered was strikingly simple. Previous transformation attempts had largely been imposed on the market rather than created with it. Thousands of people whose work would fundamentally change felt they had little involvement in shaping that future. So she changed the approach.

“Not one of my predecessors had ever included the people in the market in the change.”

That meant accepting a slower start. Her team spoke to thousands of people and involved them in what was being designed. The board wanted greater pace and a more directive approach, but Inga held her ground.

The result was that implementation accelerated later. Workstreams began finishing within budget and ahead of schedule because the people expected to adopt the change had already been part of it.

Inclusion is part of the transformation infrastructure

The same principle extended beyond technology. Lloyd’s leadership had traditionally operated from an exclusive top floor of its iconic building. Inga inherited an enormous office with solid internal walls and restricted access around it. 

She knocked the walls down.

The physical change reflected something more fundamental about her leadership. If leaders isolate themselves from the organisation, they inevitably lose touch with the people experiencing it.

Inga recognised that she did not fully understand the generation entering the workplace, so she introduced reverse mentoring and worked with people in the first few years of their careers.

"If you operate from your ivory tower, how on earth do you know what's going on? You have no idea.”

As the transformation progressed, questions about technology became inseparable from questions about culture, diversity, accountability and who felt able to challenge established thinking.

Changing the system without changing those conditions would never have been enough.

Trust takes time to build and moments to lose

Importantly, Inga did not present transformation as a neat success story.

Some interventions failed spectacularly. An attempt to relax Lloyd’s strict dress code lasted only hours after complaints reached the chairman. A new alcohol policy generated international headlines and damaged some of the trust she had spent months building.

Her response to the latter was refreshingly simple. She recorded a message on her phone, admitted she had handled it badly and apologised for failing to consult people.

That willingness to acknowledge mistakes matters because transformation is rarely linear. Leaders have to make decisions with incomplete information, test ideas and sometimes discover they have misjudged the organisation.

Authenticity is not pretending to get everything right. It is being credible enough to acknowledge when you did not.

Technology changes. The human challenge remains.

Lloyd’s digitisation happened before today’s AI conversation, but that is precisely what makes the story so relevant. The technology has moved on dramatically. The human dynamics have not.

Organisations still struggle when transformation is done to people rather than with them. Leaders still underestimate the depth of attachment to established ways of working. Culture still determines whether a new system becomes part of how an organisation operates or simply another initiative people wait to pass.

Inga opened her talk by telling us that transformation is “all about the people”.

After an afternoon exploring how leadership and work are changing in the age of AI, it felt like an appropriate place to finish. Whatever technology comes next, successful transformation will still depend on our ability to listen, include, build trust and create an environment where people feel part of the change they are being asked to make.

Want to know more?

If the themes explored here resonate with you, we’d love to continue the conversation. Our Women in Transformation Community brings together senior women working across change and transformation to share experiences, challenge thinking and learn from one another. If you’d like to find out more about the Community, explore joining us at a future event or simply discuss any of the ideas raised in this article, get in touch with the S&S team.