Today we use King Arthur’s Round Table as the entry into our topic. The Round Table is the famous table around which he and his Knights congregated. Its shape implies that everyone who sits there has equal status. Wace, who relied on previous depictions of Arthur’s fabulous retinue, first described the Round Table in 1155. The symbolism of the Round Table developed over time; by the close of the 12th century it had come to represent the chivalric order associated with Arthur’s court, the Knights of the Round Table.
As with all things Arthurian, the origins of the Round Table are a bit murky. One commentator claims Arthur created the Round Table to prevent quarrels among his barons, none of whom would accept a lower place than the others. Others believe it came to prominences as a symbol of the famed order of chivalry that flourished under Arthur. In Robert de Boron’s Merlin, written around the 1190s, the wizard Merlin creates the Round Table in imitation of the table of the Last Supper and of Joseph of Arimathea’s Holy Grail table. This table has twelve seats and one empty place to mark the betrayal of Judas. This seat must remain empty until the coming of the knight of purity and chastity who will achieve the Grail. When the Knight Percival comes to the court at Camelot, he sits in the seat and initiates the Grail quest. Whatever the origins of the Round Table, it may be the single most tangible item associated with King Arthur.
I thought about these concepts surrounding the legend of the Round Table when I read a recent article in the Harvard Business Review (HBR), entitled The Agile C-Suite by Darrell K. Rigby, Sarah Elk and Steve Berez. It reminded me of my interest in agile compliance. Today, I want to consider how to make your compliance regime more agile.
The Round Table was designed so that not only would all be equal but more importantly, all would have an equal voice. That is perhaps the key aspect of agile. The function of an agile team is to create profitable, innovative solutions to problems—come up with a new service, devise a better business process, or develop an advanced technology to support new offerings. Yet it is done with input from the customer or end user. In every company the end users or customers are the employees. The advantage that agile brings is that it forces the compliance function to test its new product or service with a part of its customer base.
What an agile solution brings most readily to compliance is continuous feedback. To fully utilize the power of an agile solution in compliance, you will need to create new metrics to help determine how agile the compliance function is, “how agile it should be, whether it is moving in the right direction at the right speed, and which constraints are impeding progress. Surveys of internal and external stakeholders to obtain their subjective views of business processes combined with objective measures—such as innovation cycle times, flow efficiency (work time versus wait time), and market share changes—are useful for determining the existing state of the operating system components.” From this starting point, you can then develop “a sequenced list of activities aimed at achieving an optimal balance for each component. The agile process forces leaders to get out of their silos and work together as a multidisciplinary group, breaking through impediments and pivoting when necessary.”
Here is where the Round Table analogy is perhaps the most apt. Many business unit leaders will resist compliance initiatives because they do not believe the corporate compliance function understands the business. Some business leaders will make decisions without having all the compliance issue identified. An agile environment challenges all of that by bringing the information down to a more manageable level by forcing testing.
As the authors noted, “Agile, in short, requires humility from leaders. We don’t mean a false humility but rather the sort that accelerates learning and bolsters the confidence of every team member. Humble people recognize the futility of predicting the unpredictable and instead build rapid feedback loops to ensure that initiatives stay on track. They understand that good ideas can come from anyone, not just from those with the highest status. They view their job as helping team members learn and take responsibility, rather than telling every team member what to do and how to do it. An agile leadership team has to adopt such attitudes or its pronouncements will ring hollow.”
An agile solution should be “a carefully balanced system that delivers both stability and agility—a system that runs the business efficiently, changes the business effectively, and merges the two activities without destroying both elements.” This is precisely where compliance needs to be headed. For the Chief Compliance Officer (CCO), you will need to learn to manage both the transition to a more agile-based compliance regime and an equally agile-based leadership from your compliance team. But if you recognize it as a continuous improvement program, it can be readily seen as fulfilling the mandates of a best practices compliance program. The authors conclude, “When it all works, they improve business results, unleash the potential of employees, and enhance their personal job satisfaction.” It will certainly raise compliance to an equal in the business process and business efficiently realm.
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