Compliance 🌨️ + 🔫

Is it time to take compliance “out into the snow and put a bullet in the back of its head?” That lovely phrase was beloved of a former boss, who’d use it for any idea or strategy that hadn’t worked.

There are tensions that we struggle to talk about in public, but EVERYONE I speak to privately acknowledges:

😬 The list of things to comply with is too long

😬 This (can) make compliance performative

😬 Which then erodes trust, as people see through that

If this continues, compliance will cease to be what (many) hope and think it should be – a strategic part of decision-making and critical input into an organisation’s values and purpose.

The solution, I feel, is to get on the front foot. Decide what issues matter to you as an organisation. The UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (below) indicate they were arrived at by a committee (17?). But that doesn’t mean they’re not helpful as a starter; they’re just not helpful all at once.

The 17 SDGs should be shrunk to the few that resonate for you. For instance, it might make sense for a fashion brand to focus on those around water (it takes 12,000+ litres to make one cotton t-shirt), worker welfare (fair wages, gender equality), and carbon footprint (2-8% of greenhouse gas emissions stem from the fashion industry, with sectoral C02 emissions forecast to rise 50% by 2030). It makes less sense they focus on sanctions, and other issues (GDPR to fraud) will be niched down to those finite business functions that could be impacted.

But how, then, should we comply with all the other acronyms, which could expand forever? E, S, G, R(eputational), P(olitical), S(security), HSE, GDPR, FCPA, etc.

Triage, then comply. Triage requires filtering issues by impact and influence, which makes compliance rightsized (not overwhelming). It’s not quite that simple, but it can be made a lot less complex than you might first realise… happy to chat if it seems a bit scary.

If we’re to save compliance from the snow execution, we need to make risk, sustainability, and ethics more than mere performative box-ticking. We must rightsize and prioritise.