Closing the Compliance Effectiveness Gap
- Raimund Laqua
- Jul 17
- 2 min read
Compliance has been heading in a new direction over the last decade. It's moving beyond paper and procedural compliance towards performance and operational compliance.
This change is necessary to accommodate modern risk-based regulatory designs, which elevate outcomes and performance over instructions and rules.
Instead of checking boxes, compliance needed to become operational, which is something that LEAN, along with Operational Excellence principles and practices, helps to establish.
As LEAN endeavours to eliminate operational waste, those who are accountable for mission success have noticed that such things as defects, violations, incidents, injuries, fines, and misconduct are also wastes that take away from the value businesses strive to create.
This waste results predominately from a misalignment between organizational values and operational objectives. You can call this business integrity, which at its core is a lack of effective regulation – The Compliance Effectiveness Gap.
The Problem with Compliance
In a nutshell, compliance should ensure mission success, not hinder it.
Over the years compliance has come alongside the value chain in the form of programs associated with safety, security, sustainability, quality, legal adherence, ethics, and now responsible AI.
However, many organizations experience that these programs operate re-actively, separately, and disconnected from the purpose of protecting and ensuring mission success - the creation of value. They are misaligned not only in terms of program outcomes, but also with respect with business value.
This creates waste in the form of duplication of effort, technology, tools, and executive attention. However, perhaps more importantly, the lack of effectiveness ends up creating the conditions for non-conformance, defects, incidents, injuries, legal violations, misconduct, and business uncertainty.
Closing –The Compliance Effectiveness Gap – is now a strategic objective for organizations who are looking to maximize value creation.
A Program by a New Name
To prioritize this objective, we have renamed our advanced program from:
"The Proactive Certainty Program™" to "The Total Value Compliance Program™"
This program builds on our previous work and adds a Value Operational Assessment to identify operational capabilities needed to close – The Compliance Effectiveness Gap – the gap between organizational values and operational objectives.
With greater alignment (a measure of integrity), uncertainty decreases, risk is reduced, waste eliminated, and value maximized.
The First Step
The first step toward closing The Compliance Effectiveness Gap is a:
TOTAL VALUE COMPLIANCE AUDIT
This is not a traditional audit.
Instead, this is a 10-week participatory engagement (4 hours per week investment), where compliance program & obligation owners, managers, and teams (depending on the package chosen) will actively engage in learning, evaluation, and development of a detailed roadmap to compliance operability – compliance that is capable of being effective.
The deliverables you receive include:
Executive / Management Education (Operational Compliance)
Integrative Program Evaluation (Values Operations Alignment)
Total Value Compliance Roadmap (Minimal Viable Compliance Operability)
The compounding value you will enjoy:
Turning compliance from a roadblock into a business accelerator
Aligning your values with your operations for better business integrity
Creating competitive advantage, and greater stakeholder trust
Enabling innovation and productivity instead of hindering them
Are you ready to finally close The Compliance Effective Gap?
