Requirements Docs are Dead: Lessons from the “Human Reality Check” Panel
If you walked the floor at the Hilton London Bankside at the Digital Transformation in Insurance Conference, you heard a lot about “straight-through processing” and “autonomous agents.” But during the Intelligent Automation Reality Check panel, our Solutions Architect, Adam Elleston, posed a question that brought the room to a standstill:
“If our requirements documents are so perfect, why does the software they produce so often fail the people using it?”
The uncomfortable truth for the insurance sector in 2026 is that the traditional requirements document has become a billion-dollar blind spot.
The Fiction of the “Perfect Spec”
For decades, the industry has relied on a linear process: Business analysts interview stakeholders, write a 100-page PDF of “user stories,” hand it to developers, and hope for the best.
We call this the “Chinese Whispers” model of digital transformation. By the time a developer writes a single line of code, the nuance of the actual business problem has been filtered through three different departments and a dozen spreadsheets. The result? A digital version of a broken paper process.
You cannot automate what you do not truly understand. When you treat the human expert as a variable to be “automated away” rather than the primary architect of the logic, you don’t get efficiency, you get a very expensive mismatch.
The “Coloured Cards and Sharpies” Revolution
We’ve retired the 100-page spec. Instead, we advocate for a Discovery-First methodology rooted in Event Storming.
As Adam discussed on the panel, the most powerful tool in digital transformation isn’t a new LLM; it’s a wall, a stack of orange sticky notes, and a handful of Sharpies.
By bringing claims adjusters, underwriters, and developers into one room to map out “Business Events” (e.g., “Claim Lodged,” “Policy Flagged,” “Payment Authorised”), we bypass the jargon. We find the “Hidden Waste”—those manual workarounds and “swivel-chair” data entries that your team has learned to live with so well they don’t even see them anymore.
Why Discovery Trumps Documentation
This isn’t just about being “agile.” It’s about De-risking the Delivery.
The “Human Reality Check” taught us that the future of insurance isn’t just about smarter code; it’s about smarter collaboration. If your digital strategy starts with a document instead of a conversation with your experts, you’re already behind.
Is it time to burn your requirements docs and start storming?