About

Showing compliance means creating your organisation’s value in accordance with the rules, regulations and best practices set for and by your industry. Over-reliance on compliance, occurs when a ‘forest’ of rules and regulations exists, in which the trees cannot be clearly identified anymore. It has become confusing, (too) restrictive or straight forward impossible to follow all existing regulations anymore, leading to alternative ways of working, as is judged best at a particular time in a particular situation. Deviances of the norm may have become the new norm, often unseen until that day that somethings happens.

Compliance remains key to your existence, hence managing compliance a key activity. To be monitored and managed is that ‘we do what we say and we say what we do’; both and at the same time. This requires ‘Compliance’ to become an activity rather than a pre-dominantly paperwork exercise. A most interesting and enjoyable activity, as it is what you do every day what matters, less what we say we do.

Managing safety is about maintaining your risks to harm  below or at an acceptable level. Many would define it as an absence of harm; operating without experiencing or inflicting damage, injury or worse. One challenge occurs with the last interpretation when applied to any operation: does the presence of ‘harm’ necessarily mean that your operation is unsafe? And how much presence would be acceptable before we call it unsafe?

Operating safely begins with understanding your operation in its context, the associated risks and what happens, all the time. In today’s complexity, this is easier said than done: how does one (person, department, entire organisation) ‘know’ what is going on all the time? And even if we know, are we in control of our operations all the time or have higher levels of technology and complexity also increased your dependency on technology, systems and other parties to run your operations successfully?

The simplest way to put performance is ‘doing something.’ Do something well, good performance and do something bad… etc. In our approach we do not separate operational performance from safety performance, operational management from safety management, leadership from ‘safety leadership’…  The main and simplest reasoning behind that is that people do not think way. People make decisions all the time, weighing up pros and cons and if they are pretty sure it will go wrong, they think twice and come up with an alternative, or stop. In an organisation, it works very similar. An organisation has the right to exist based on the value they produce. This value must be created responsibly and safely, but creating value and doing it responsibly are not separate activities. The separation can be a cause for some safety and management programs not giving the results as expected, as the separation causes ‘safety’ or ‘quality’ too often to be regarded as taking out the fun, or being in the way of, efficiency or profitability. And that is a pity for all parties included, as it simply does not have to be that way at all. Good organisation performance is about setting people up for success as much as possible.

Optimisation is about doing something as well as we can. This does not mean perfect, as unforeseen and uncontrollable circumstances are part of everyday life, whether we like it or not. For optimisation we need all input that exist and make that work as well as can. We do as well we can within the given constraints, we make the most of opportunities that arise. Both at the same time.  This requires an integrated approach, in which we are realistic about risks and constraints but also have commitment to the value we would like to create. Even though conflict may arise as conflict is a natural part in any system or organisation, the way we approach it, remains integrated, finding solutions towards the best possible overall results.