Over 3 years ago we launched Lean Compliance in response to the lack of sustainable compliance effectiveness across mostly ever sector as organizations struggled under the weight primarily of existing and changing prescriptive regulations and standards.
The compliance landscape was also starting to transform as regulators were modernizing their programs to become more risk-based as they moved towards performance and regulatory designs. While the impact of this transformation would ultimately reduce the weight of regulation it would require different skills and a new mindset; something that many organizations did not have or have time to learn.
To navigate this new landscape companies would need to become more proactive, own their obligations, and commit to continual improvement. Instead of inspection and audit regimes as the trigger for improvement, companies would need to set obligation goals, measure progress, and manage risk. Performance rather than checkbox compliance would become the new mandate.
However, organizations were too busy being reactive, fighting fires, and had little time to be proactive and for the most part didn't know how. Space also needed to be created for improvement to occur. This is where LEAN would help to eliminate waste and create capacity to escape the reactive uncertainty trap and allow companies to begin their journey towards proactive certainty of their compliance objectives and goals.
This birthed The Proactive Certainty Program™ which we launched to effect our mission to help companies lift the weight of regulation and improve their compliance effectiveness in a sustainable way through continuous improvement over time.
As our mission continued we quickly realized that not much had been written about effective compliance and specifically how performance and outcome-based obligations might be managed. So we started to do research and explored what this all might look like which we wrote about in blog posts every week.
With every post (over 200 at this point), presentation, webinar, and consulting engagement we begain to lay the foundation for Effective Compliance. We started at the source of the obligations and worked our way to the outcomes that companies committed to achieve. This resulted in the formulation of:
A regulatory classification model
An obligation taxonomy
The Compliance Value Chain
The Proactive Certainty Model™
The 10 Rules for Effective Compliance
A proactive accountability management framework
A proactive model for governance risk and compliance (GRC)
Strategies to apply systems & risk-based thinking, and lean & performance management to improve the probability of meeting obligations.
A system of measures: effectiveness, performance and conformance to help govern (i.e. steer) towards better outcomes
Digital strategies to improve the probability of mission success
and numerous other methods and practices.
Many of the concepts and principles we presented were in the form of diagrams to help describe behaviors, relationships, and elements as we worked towards a comprehensive operational model to effectively manage obligations.
Several have commented and indicated how much you have benefited from the insights communicated in these diagrams and blog posts over the last three years. This has been instrumental by providing valuable feedback which we have used to improve the utility of our models. This has been very satisfying for us and a source of much encouragement which we are truly grateful.
It has been a fantastic journey so for but there is still much to do.
We would love to help more companies escape the reactive uncertainty trap and realize the benefits that come from effective compliance programs. One of the things we are working on is compiling all our work and creating an Effective Compliance Handbook. We will keep folks posted as we get closer to publication.
If you want to launch your own mission towards effective compliance compliance, consider our 12-week virtual boot camp. Through weekly coaching sessions we help you develop a detailed improvement roadmap for one of your compliance programs: quality, safety, security, environmental, regulatory, risk, process safety, or pipeline safety. To learn more contact us at bootcamp@leancompliance.ca (individual and team rates available).
Continue to be safe and proactive.
