effrey Ma, former vice president of analytics and data science for Twitter, predictive analytics expert for ESPN, kingpin of the famous MIT Blackjack Team, and former vice president of Microsoft for Startups, was the featured speaker at the Ratemaking, Product, and Modeling seminar (RPM) in March.

Ma has worn many hats across his lifelong endeavors in education, hobbies, and careers, with one simple mantra: If you make better decisions than the system expects, you will always have the edge. As a former member of the MIT Blackjack Team, he applied his innovative approach to casino gambling to bring down the house by counting cards. Although he has since traded the blackjack table for a boardroom table, he continues to apply the same strategy in business — be brave enough to innovate when others are content with comfort.

Actuaries understand this line of reasoning but too often lack the incentives to effect innovative change. In his chat, Ma recounted a paper written by David Romer in 2002, which uncovered a paradigm-shifting conclusion for NFL teams: Coaches were far too conservative on fourth downs and should significantly increase their conversion attempts to maximize their chances of winning. Of the historical situations where the fourth down attempt was deemed advantageous, teams were “going for it” only 10% of the time. The evidence was clear, the advantage was quantified, and the findings were published in the National Bureau of Economic Research.

And then… nothing changed. In practice, coaches were not seeking to optimize win probability; they were optimizing job security. In their eyes, the avoidance of high variance situations was just as valuable as eliminating the downside risk, which was the risk of incurring memorable moments of failure. Why risk “losing” the game early in the fourth quarter when there would be a future, albeit less likely, prolonged opportunity for a comeback win? Faced with decisions where the data favored aggression, coaches consistently chose the more conservative, defensible path. As Philip Seymour Hoffman said in his depiction of Art Howe in “Moneyball,” “I’m playing my team in a way that I can explain in job interviews next winter.”

Actuaries are often placed in similar situations. When long-term strategy takes a back seat to short-term visibility, decisions can gradually become more political than analytical, eroding a company’s competitive edge over time. On any given day, the loss of that edge is nearly imperceptible. Each individual decision is small, defensible, and easy to justify, but in hindsight it becomes clear that misaligned incentives quietly steer the organization away from maximizing its advantage. So why don’t more of us push for new, innovative ideas?

“New is scary,” says Ma. New ideas mean struggling through learning new technology. New ideas mean making an outside hire. New ideas mean leaving a steady job to pursue your own adventure. In the broadest sense, “to embrace new ideas is to embrace failure,” says Ma. It’s providing the activation energy to a system that rewards long-run strategies with often brutal short-term variance and staying the course until the signal overtakes the noise.

One way to break out of this mindset, says Ma, is to return to first principles. Rather than debating within the confines of existing processes, Ma encourages reframing problems in their simplest, most indisputable terms. What are we actually trying to optimize? What is the data actually trying to say? By cutting through the comfort of conventional frames of mind, organizations can create space for ideas that would otherwise be dismissed too quickly.

“Innovation does not occur in the absence of constraints; it often emerges because of them,” says Ma. Whether it is regulatory limitations in insurance or outdated structural rules applied in a brand-new industry, constraints force clarity. They require organizations to be precise about where their edge lies and how to exploit it. In this sense, constraints are not barriers to innovation, but catalysts for it.

Ultimately, the challenge is not identifying the edge; it is having the conviction to act on it. We spend years learning how to find out when and where an advantage exists, yet when it comes time to act, incentives and short-term pressures can cause that to go to waste. The data is often clear, the strategy is often sound, but without alignment of incentives and a willingness to endure short-term discomfort, even the best ideas fail to take hold. Ma’s message is a reminder that while intelligence helps, innovation really requires courage — the courage to challenge convention, to withstand variance, and to make decisions that may look wrong in the moment but are right in expectation. In a profession built on cutting through the noise to find the truth, the real opportunity lies in having the discipline to trust the math when it matters most.