Enabling Controls

Achieve greater safety, efficiency and
productivity by harnessing frontline
expertise in critical control design

 

Continuously improve control effectiveness by using human-centred design

Critical controls designed without frontline user input have a high failure rate. Because they’re not designed in consultation with the people who actually do the work, staff can devise alternative methods that at best cut productivity and safety or, at worst, cause significant unwanted events or catastrophic failure.

There is a far more effective way. By incorporating the concepts of human centred design we enable you to create the most reliable strategies for designing out hazards, reducing the nature of hazards and introducing innovative new controls. Safety and productivity are significantly enhanced, and leadership has governance assurance.

 

Another audit? Or bring together your systems experts and frontline staff?

Traditional approaches to control design are procedural and compliance-focused, they’re designed by people who don’t understand the practical aspects of the work. There is often no method of assessing how well these controls work, other than whether people apply them or not.

If they fail, an audit results in more controls being devised with no input from users, driving people to find yet another way of working around an ineffective control.

Art of Work’s Enabling Controls method turns this approach on its head. We bring together the systems experts and frontline staff in your organisation. We harness their combined expertise to implement and continuously improve control design to significantly strengthen safety and productivity.

Enabling Controls empowers you to diagnose the strength and weakness of every control, and to identify opportunities to boost control effectiveness. It gives you confidence in critically analysing your control effectiveness, complying with your enterprise risk management strategy and meeting due diligence obligations.

 

Art of Work’s Enabling Controls approach can improve your organisation’s control design & effectiveness through:

  • Due diligence and governance assessment of your risk management system

  • Analysis of control effectiveness both at an organisational level and frontline level

  • Test the gap between control as intended and control as done

  • Harness frontline expertise through user experience and human-centred design

  • Test controls for human dependency

  • Benchmark industry best practice for control design.

 

The Audit Cycle and the Two Kinds of Experts

Dr Jop Havinga discusses The Audit Cycle through the work of Daniel Kahneman and Gary Klein and their paper, 'Failure to Disagree'.

Dr Havinga discusses how the types of expertise within an organisation can differ, and how understanding the kind of feedback available to those closest to the work can better inform the design of the controls that work replies upon for success.

Industries that have benefited
from Enabling Controls

 

  • Manufacturing

  • Aerospace

  • Mining

  • Defence

  • Construction

Enabling Controls Solutions

Art of Work offers a variety of programs that can be tailor-made to the needs of your organisation

Strategic review and design of critical risks

We conduct a strategic review of your organisational risks. This ensures a full understanding of the nature of all hazards, and the nature of associated risks.

Develop critical control performance measures for operational effectiveness

We critically analyse your organisational risk registers for risk design. We examine whether they accurately inform management of the nature of the risks and the nature of the controls.

Performance test risk registers

Once we understand the work as intended, we performance test the controls. Are they effective? Do they reflect the work as it is done? Do they enable people to do their work safely and reliably?  

Provide leadership with the tools and data to meet due diligence obligations

Leadership gains the tools to accurately determine the nature of operational hazards, design effective control strategies and understand and measure their performance. Compliance is maintained and the effectiveness of your system is verified. 

 
 
 

The benefits to you:
Leadership

  • Develop a clear understanding of work as done 

  • Gain greater insight into the nature of critical risks and controls

  • Develop more insightful questions for leadership, operations, experts and frontline people

  • Ensure confidence in your control strategy and control effectiveness

  • Know your due diligence obligations are properly met.

Operations

  • Better understand and effectively manage human dependency on controls

  • Ensure controls are designed to facilitate safety, reliability and productivity for people who do the work

  • Contribute to continuous improvement of control design

  • Improve communications on control design and effectiveness to management.



 

Our expert consultants will work with you to continuously improve your control design and effectiveness, achieving greater safety, efficiency and productivity.