President's Message

Connecting the Dots

Connecting the Dots

By: Lisa Slotznick

My last President’s Message! During 2024, my messages have covered a range of issues impacting the Academy, our members as actuaries, and our readers as participants in society. Starting with the Academy’s Competency Framework forming the basis of our new membership requirements,[1] to last issue’s focus on self-regulation going hand-in-hand with mitigating the actuarial profession’s reputational risk—these bracketed discussions of mega-issues such as climate, retirement and health care, and cyber.

The Academy’s members, as actuaries, touch lots of issues both directly and indirectly. Name an issue: I can name a connection to actuaries. It may be a connection to the employee benefits and financial planning of the people involved in the issue, the property or liability insurance of the business involved, or the impact of an event on any of the above. As I have traveled for the Academy this year, watching my frequent travel points increase, I know there is an actuary likely looking at the design of these loyalty plans and accruals for them on the hotel’s or airline’s balance sheet, as I am waiting to use the points in the future.

We specialize in uncertainty and our ability to put a number on something that others may be uncomfortable quantifying, as we know that the number we produce will be wrong. That takes a thick skin and a special skill. We recognize that there is a range around the values that we set forth as an answer, in which the actual outcome will fall. We get it. But because we know our principals do not, we disclose this uncertainty.

But given our comfort in quantifying uncertain things, we are often outside our comfort zone when we try to connect the dots with actuaries practicing in a different area. It’s true that only a rare few actuaries are qualified to practice in multiple areas. That being said, we are in a position to understand better than most how different practice areas may relate to our own. This is the beauty of the Academy and its ability to perform cross-practice public policy and professionalism work.

  • Actuaries are in a position to connect a lot of dots among issues and bring these forward to public policymakers who live in a less specialized environment than we are in. Often our technical actuarial work is siloed into a narrow specialty—and so too portions of our core public policy and professionalism concerns and work products are siloed, and need to be. But we can provide more value on the bigger picture by connecting these dots. While a single actuary may not be able to opine on this aggregate impact, we can work together to provide insights that cross our siloes and lines.
  • The Academy’s “cross-practice” committees—whether in the area of commentary on “fairness” regulations and legislation, data science, artificial intelligence, climate, financial reporting, enterprise risk management (ERM), behavioral economics or asset analysis, to name a few—connect the dots of the expertise of actuaries from different practice areas. In this way, the Academy and its leaders make our work greater than the sum of our parts.

We specialize in putting a number on something that others may be uncomfortable quantifying, as we know that the number we produce will be wrong. That takes a thick skin and a special skill.

  • All that being said, far too many of us only read the papers or attend the webinars in our narrow practice area. During my time as president, I have attended webinars outside my own practice area and read cross-practice materials in an effort to learn about all parts of the Academy. Almost always, I am able to bring back something that I can apply in my own area. This is a way to broaden my actuarial knowledge and look for ways to connect the dots.
  • We can all be better actuaries, Academy members, and citizens if we look past our own area. This is much like getting a liberal arts background in college, where we look for courses outside our own major to broaden ourselves so that our knowledge base is not narrow.

May we all continue to look beyond our own areas for ideas and growth.

Postscript: As I began my year as president of the Academy, one of my fears related to writing this column for you. Only you can judge its adequacy, but I have accomplished it. In the next issue, you’ll hear from our next president, and the cycle will begin again! May we break the Longevity Illustrator and read many more President’s Messages. Thanks for the opportunity.


Reference
[1] For more on the new membership requirements, see the September Actuarial Update.

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