The tricky thing about disruption is that it makes for so many awkward conversations.

This week , we’ve been struggling to get some currency behind the concept of a Pension SuperHaven. It is a pension scheme that offers those who don’t want their pension pots bobbing along on the open sea, a harbour where they can be safe and be turned into an income – automatically and from the day the pot arrives.

I am not that worried about my pot bobbing along, so long as it’s drifting in the right direction and there is some sense that it will eventually arrive in harbour. The harbour could of course be an annuity , but many of us think that that is not a particularly productive place to consign our savings, some of us would like our money to work a little harder than it does in an annuity, both for us and for the planet, society and for making things done better (governance).

This is why we want to promote pensions over annuities and both over the idea that your pot has to bob along on the waves till it is exhausted or abandoned at sea!

The awkward conversations I have been having since Edi Truell and I published out intention to offer Pension SuperHaven to steelworkers has been with those charged with the “air, sea rescue” of pensions. These good souls include the Pensions Regulator (now back at work), the FCA, the Treasury and the PPF. All of them are concerned in different ways that the Pension SuperHaven might be a less than satisfactory harbour and that people might be better off in another harbour, or on the open sea or simply sat at home with a big fat pile of cash.

The job of air sea rescue is of course not to stop people going to sea but to make sure they are safe about it. So it is awkward when they are used to a set way of doing things, when somebody (like us) comes along and says “we can do something rather better”, especially when doing something rather better stays within the guidelines you’ve set for these things to be done.

Because the natural reaction of anyone who makes or enforces the rules, is to want to create and enforce new rules when something different comes along. But the Pension SuperHaven isn’t very different, in fact it’s precisely the kind of harbour that the air sea and rescue people have said they wanted to be opened to those stranded at sea.

The most disruptive thing about Pension SuperHaven is that it is so very normal. Like a lot of good ideas , people are saying “why hasn’t anyone done this before?” and to that question I must reply that E=MC2 is now very simple and very normal but until Einstein wrote it down, we struggled with a theory of relativity,

Nobody likes a smart Alec, I don’t want to be Alec and I’m not very smart. But I do see a good idea and want to run with it and when Mr Truell put to me the idea of a Pension SuperHaven, it took me a few weeks not to get very cross about it. If the answer to my particular pension problem (too much pot and not enough pension) was as simple as to give some or all of my pot to Pension SuperHaven, then the millions of man and woman hours spent debating efficient drawdowns, CDC, annuity variants and choice architecture might be deemed a WOT.

That the answer to my problem is as simple as a reverse transfer into a DB pension scheme backed by a fund and a buffer, seems too good to be true. I have learned that if something that looks too good to be true , probably is too good to be true and I have been taught since the start of the century that DB pensions are a bit of a nonsense.

For all these reasons, for all these deep-rooted and well-intentioned prejudices, I have a great deal of sympathy, as they are the prejudices that I have had and have held most dear.

However, they are still prejudices and need to be challenged. The key to this all, is that we approach the subject with a sense of humour and with a degree of brotherly and sisterly goodwill!