I returned from Switzerland yesterday evening , buoyed by discussions with my colleagues and enervated by the majesty of the high alps.
One email from Jnamdoc has set my pulse beating this morning. I am naughty when quoting private correspondence so won’t. The title of the blog is from the mail!
The spores are in the wind
We get progress in many ways. Yesterday the PLSA were at Caxton House meeting with the new Pensions Minister.
The PLSA are also of the process. They can spread the spores and I hope that they will continue to promote the importance of pensions as well as lifetime savings.
The mastertrusts , the current collector of lifetime savings are a part of the process, not only can those savings be drawn down under the pension freedoms, but they can collectively provide pensions using new and intuitive pension mechanisms that deliver what people expect as workplace pensions.
The insurers who not only control much of the money in master trusts but have the contract based workplace pension market pretty well to themselves – can also be part of the process. Though they operate the annuity system which is important for those with the ability to do their own pension, they can also participate in new and intuitive pension arrangements that provide what most people expect from a personal pension.
The spores of change are in the wind and as they blow across fertile land, they catch in the soil and take root.
These spores are not just sown by the PLSA, the master trusts and the ABI, they are blown from many different sources and find many random habitats to germinate in.
This blog is variously a zephyr or a gale, distributing ideas such as SeLFIES, Pension SuperHaven and the value of capital as a means to support long term pension investment. It is a blog that promotes the adoption of AI to help people along the limbs of decision trees. It disseminates.
While the object of the verb disseminate may be something tangible, such as an infectious agent, nowadays the thing most often disseminated, or “spread abroad as though sowing seed,” is information. Where does this metaphorical verb come from? In Latin, the dis- prefix signifies separation or dispersal, while the -sem- element springs from semen “seed.”
The same Latin noun is found in a number of other English words with figurative meanings: seminary (which now is a training facility for priests, but initially was a place where seeds were raised to plants), seminal (meaning “containing the seeds of later development”), and yes, the word semen.
And there is a counter-factual to dissemination. It is barren-ness, a state where nothing grows, where once fertile land becomes arid through lack of cultivation and a failure to fertilise.
This is what happens when information is no longer spread about, where we stop talking with each other about how to make things better but retreat into huddles , creating moats around what we have.
My three days in Switzerland , and the wonderful message I received from Jnamdoc , have left me all the keener to disseminate new ideas and I’m very pleased to have got another kind invitation from the PLSA to be at their October conference in Liverpool where I will be able to spend more time sending spores upon the wind of change!