The RRR is much more important
All of us are thinking or talking about the RDR. After all, this initiative maps our lives out for us over the next few years, and a minor mistake in getting things wrong is likely to affect our livelihoods for quite some time.
The RDR is important then, but for quite some time, we've been getting rather more concerned about the 'RRR', or to spell it out in full, the 'Rudimentary Reflection of Reality'. It's a term we coined off the back of one of our increasingly irate letters to a leading European insurer, which managed to foul up a simple information enquiry so profoundly that some six months later on the poor client still has no information to base her decisions on. Recently, we received the considered, formal response to our complaint, the fruition of several months-worth of investigation.
To say that the results of the formal investigation bore no relation to the actual catalogue of events would perhaps be a little unfair. The insurer did, after all manage to get the name right and we therefore probably shouldn't be churlish. Beyond that, however, you would swear that they were talking about someone else. Reality was only reflected in the most rudimentary way.
Hence the coining of the term RRR. We think it's a useful one, as it suggest at the very least the minimum degree of correlation between what exists in our head, with what actually exists in the real world. Regulatory bureaucracy ought to correlate with (a) the real needs of the population, and (b) the actual skills of financial advisers. Product-providers' customer service functions ought to correlate with the actual circumstances and requests of their customers. Our financial-planning proposition ought to correlate with the real needs and priorities of our clients.
It is no use at all having a great idea in one's head, if that idea has little or no relevance to the very people we want to talk to. This is why the positive feedback loop is so essential - are you using it to test out and refine your service proposition? | 
