I became President of the Institute and Faculty of Actuaries in June 2016. The institution was already more than 160 years old. I was its youngest president, the first to be based outside the United Kingdom, and the first person of colour to hold the role. The IFoA’s own announcement focused on where I lived. The international press focused on everything else.
I was conscious of what the appointment represented. I was equally determined that it would not become the story of my presidency, because I wanted to be judged on what I did with the opportunity rather than on being first. The role taught me a great deal about leading change, most of it unrelated to having the better argument.
Much of what I learned in that period sits behind Empowered Evolution, the book I went on to write around a framework of Mindset, Meaning and Momentum. The presidency was where I first understood how tightly people hold on to identities and definitions of success that have stopped serving them, my own included.
Leading as an Outsider in a 160-Year-Old Profession
My route into the profession was never conventional. I did not finish my actuarial science degree, I qualified through professional examinations, and I spent a large part of my career outside the UK. By 2016 I was younger than most people who had held the presidency, I was based in Africa, and I was a Black woman leading a historically British profession. There were moments when I was conscious that I did not fit the established mould.
Being an outsider carries an advantage that took me a while to recognise. You notice conventions that people inside a system take for granted. I was more willing to ask why we did things a particular way, who the profession was actually serving, who felt part of it and what it needed to become.
I also carried a belief about myself that did not survive the role. I thought I had to prove I deserved to be there. When you are visibly different, it is easy to feel you are carrying more than your own ambitions, that your successes and failures say something about everyone who comes after you. I understand that differently now. Leadership is not an audition for belonging. You can take the responsibility seriously without constantly justifying your presence in the room.
What I Set Out to Change, and What Actually Changed
I had two priorities. The first was to push the profession to become genuinely global rather than a British institution with international members. Being based outside the UK gave me a different view of what that required, and I spent much of my term representing the profession beyond Britain, including in Africa and India.
The second was cultural. I wanted us to think more expansively about who an actuary could be and where actuaries could contribute. Diversity was part of that. Relevance was the larger question.
Some of it worked. I helped widen the conversation about the profession’s future, and occupying the role showed that its leadership could look and sound different from what had come before. The messages I received from people who told me that seeing someone like me in that position changed what they imagined was possible for themselves have stayed with me.
What I misjudged was pace. I expected more to change within a single presidential term than was ever realistic. A president serves for a relatively short period, while an institution builds its habits and identity over generations. You can influence direction, open doors and change conversations, and still find that the institution itself has not moved. Agreement is not the same as change, and people can support an idea sincerely while the organisation around them carries on exactly as before.
Why People Resist Change, and What Sits Underneath It
Some of the resistance I met was explicit. Most of it was quieter. Long established institutions develop firm ideas about how things are done, what leadership looks like and how fast anything should move. Nobody has to say no. Often the resistance is simply the gravitational pull of precedent.
Some of it was internal. When you meet opposition while already feeling different, there is a temptation to ask whether you are pushing too hard, or whether you would get further by making yourself more acceptable to the system.
The lesson that took me longest to absorb is that a strong argument for change is not enough. You have to understand what people believe they are being asked to give up. What presents as resistance to an idea is very often anxiety about identity, status, competence or loss. Once I started asking what sat underneath the objection, the conversations changed.
I became less interested in winning the argument. That did not mean abandoning the change. It meant accepting that change is a human process rather than an intellectual one, and that it moves faster with allies selling a shared vision than with one person carrying it alone. I was fortunate to have a supportive presidential team around me.
Given that term again, I would build those coalitions before trying to move anything. I was impatient then. If something seemed obviously sensible to me, I assumed that explaining it clearly enough would create momentum. I think far more now about readiness, because people need time to make sense of change and to work out where they fit in the future you are describing.
What Makes Change Last in an Old Institution
Organisations do not change because the case for change is compelling. Institutions have memories, identities, incentives and deeply embedded ways of working, and change that lasts comes from understanding those things rather than dismissing them. You need enough respect for the past to understand why an institution became what it is, and enough courage to refuse to let that past decide what it must remain.
I ask different questions now as a result. In boardrooms I am interested not only in what decision is being made, but in what assumptions are shaping it, whose voices carry weight, and what the organisation has stopped noticing because this is how it has always been done.
What the Presidency Changed in Me
It changed my relationship with belonging. Earlier in my career I think I unconsciously believed that success meant becoming accomplished enough to feel completely at home in certain rooms. You can reach the centre of an institution and still feel like an outsider. What I came to understand is that belonging cannot depend on whether a particular institution, profession or group reflects you back to yourself. A great deal of my thinking and writing since has come out of that realisation.
I see the same pattern in coaching, at an individual level. Very capable people spend enormous energy trying to become acceptable to systems that were never designed with them in mind. Sometimes growth means learning to work within the system more effectively. Sometimes it means changing it. Sometimes it means recognising that you no longer need its permission.
If You Are Facing a Change of Your Own
Do not confuse uncertainty with evidence that you are making the wrong move. The periods in which our lives are changing most profoundly rarely feel neat while we are living through them.
Empowered Evolution came out of my own experience of significant transitions, and out of seeing how often we stay attached to identities, beliefs and definitions of success that once served us and no longer do. It is built around a framework of Mindset, Meaning and Momentum, which helps you examine what you believe, reconnect with what matters to you, and turn that clarity into action.
Evolution does not require you to have the entire next chapter mapped out. It often begins with becoming honest about what no longer belongs in the current one.
Empowered Evolution is available in print and Kindle editions. Read more about the book and order your copy.