When is a deadline not a deadline?

In the world of regulatory change, it used to be so simple - well relatively. When a business was given a date that it need to comply by, well that was pretty much fixed. Ahead of this and in good time it would have the information it needed in order to work out how to comply.

Well, that is how I recall it and certainly when one went to management with the messaage "we need to do X by Y in order to comly with Z" they tended to believe you and then support the necessary work.

I have blogged before about the increased complexity and lack of clarity that is plaguing many regulatory changes these days, but worse than this is the endemic issue of softening dates. By this I mean dates get set by the regulators and for various reasons, legal, political or simple obstinancy, they are held to even when they are increasingly untenable. As a change agent one can only report and work to the dates given, until, far too often to be good, they are then slipped. This could be three months, six months, and I even hear talk of two years in some cases. Prima facie you may think this reflects badly on the regulators, but it makes the life of an in-house regulatory change manager harder - their credibility erodes every time they have to say something like, "well you know yesterday I said we had to have this done by the end of the month/tomorrow/etc, well we now have three/six/twelve months.

The psychology is that increasingly no regulatory dates is believed, especially when the business wants to dedicate a limited set of resources to other business building / revenue generating activities.
Then we start hearing a different language come out. I have heard tell that regulators are looking for "best endeavours", which means different things to different people. In a near regulatory change, ie not pure regulation, but related, I read that that those affected should have "made significant progress by X" and "be substantially complete by Y". Please define significant and and substantial in this context?

There are many people wanting to comply and working hard to do so, but this shifting sand of dates is not helping anyone. I understand that each political and regulatory element is pushing its own interests, sometimes though not always within a common intent, but the result is that no one is satisfied.

Any business faced with this sort of issue within its own change agenda will almost certainly be forced at some point to take stock, prioritise and focus. It feels as if this is what is needed within financial regulation, but can anyone call it? Will anyone be brave enough to step up and highlight the issues? Can the G20 or something similar take stock and rethink? What would it take to make the G20 think again?

I don't mean give up on everything that is proposed. It is not about capitulation, but rather about pragmatism and priorities. There are things that make sense even if others do not.

If this does not happen I see this state of affairs persisting for a long time and in all probability getting worse as new layers of approved regulation are laid up on as yet implemented regulations and so on. On a cycnial level this should keep me in work until I retire, but is hardly part of the legacy I would want hand on to our children!