Cost of Compliance in Australia
Total $249 Billion
• $94 billion to administer and comply with public sector rules
• A whopping $155 billion to administer and comply with self-imposed rules and regulations
— Deloitte 2014 Report
Do your systems enable or constrain?
For years, Australian businesses have adopted a model of performance by constraint…
Where rules don’t exist, we create them.
Where they already do, we make more.
They overlap, they contradict, they eat our time and they weigh us down
Professor Erik Hollnagel asked a key question in his research:
Why don’t we spend more time understanding why things go right instead of just trying to stop things go wrong?
After all, something that goes right cannot go wrong at the same time.
Enabling Systems
Enabling Systems recognise that it is people, not systems that create business success.
Only people can adapt, accommodate, absorb and navigate their way through everyday complexities.
Interestingly, when something goes well, we commonly attribute it to the systems in place at the time. When something goes wrong, often we attribute it to people’s misgivings or failure to adhere to the system.
This is how we got to where we are.
Enabling Systems invites six shifts in thinking and practices. While we value historical methods of driving improvements, we’ve witnessed the growth, resilience and success that occurs when systems are geared towards supporting success, rather than avoid failure, and the greater sense of purpose and ownership that this delivers people.
Enabling Systems invites six shifts in thinking and practices, while at the same time valuing what has historically driven performance improvements.
Conventional System Principles
The system is complete and error-free
Deviations from the plan cause unwanted events
Variability is a threat
People are a liability
Procedural compliance is mandatory
How can people be controlled?
6 Enabling Systems Principles
The system is not error-free in itself
Unwanted events occur when more resources are needed
Variability is inevitable
People can adapt, accommodate, absorb and respond to emerging threats
People at all levels create success through practice
How can people be supported to adapt successfully?
Its a paradigm shift.
Its about systems serving people and not the other way around.
We improve efficiency and reduce the compliance of work.
To overcome these constraining performance practices, Art of Work applies its enabling systems approach.
Instead of addressing operational weakness by only applying additional constraints, strengths are built through human factors boosting capability, harnessing the potential of people to contribute and, in setting people and teams up for success, demonstrating genuine ethical care and responsibility.
Improving performance by aligning organisational strengths requires a shift from constraint to enabling; enabling as many things as possible to go right despite varying circumstances.
This goal not only changes the definition of what systems must provide but also how performance is understood, assessed, communicated and practiced.
We’ve lost our way…
The focus on compliance is pervasive; it has become something that employees owe to an organisation.
Filling out forms and completing checklists – it’s something people do to look good to regulators or achieve compliance to standards.
Put differently, systems have become a bureaucratic accountability that is managed upwards, not something that is designed to support people’s success.
It’s not about the absence of failure. It’s about the presence of success.
Certification against the ISO standards can be a licence to operate.
This doesn’t mean that the tail needs to wag the dog.
Conventional compliance is based on the assumption that unwanted deviations can be avoided by constraining people and processes. While performance by constraint may produce some improvements, it also produces a range of problematic side effects, such as:
Reactive management
Performance drag from ever-increasing compliance demands
Increased disengagement of frontline expertise
Increased bureaucratisation of decision-making processes
Art of Work specialises in ensuring
systems don’t create a burden the business
systems reflect reality
systems support delivery of the success that the business exists for
systems are integrated, delivering quality, safe and productive outcomes
people remain at the center of performance outcomes
