🚧 Friction mapping: 15min of work could heavily impact your sanctions compliance program
TL;DR
Do you struggle with finding the right compliance measures? Do you focus on screening? Automation? Training? Awareness?
If you don't know where to start, take 15 minutes to map all frictions that prevent an employee to perform a target behavior.
And then, as a compliance measure, you increase or remove the friction.
To show you how, I've made a case study about economic sanctions. The target behavior is that Sales detects red flags as early as possible in the prospection phase.
Where to start?
If there is a new regulation to comply with, you sometimes wonder: where do I start?
Let's take the economic sanctions, like the ones against Russia. These are not new as such, but have expanded seriously since the war against Ukraine started at the beginning of 2022.
To comply, you need to take certain measures internally: you need to use new screening procedures, or review your product portfolio. You may need to train specific employee groups on this new thing. And what do you communicate to the rest of the company?
A lot of options.
But what do you do first? What's most important?
How do you prioritize?
To get an immediate grip, I'd recommend reviewing key business processes and mapping all frictions in that process.
💡
This Mini Guide is all about mapping frictions. But in case you wonder "Which business process are actually key?" then I got news for you: this will be a topic for a next Mini Guide 🥳!
After the friction mapping, you will feel confident about your next steps: about where and when you intervene, as compliance team.
What we will cover below:
What is friction?
Frictions in compliance
Case study: economic sanctions (+ completed template)
My advice
What is friction?
Friction is the time, money, or effort we need to spend doing something.
We want to avoid instinctively friction that we experience or expect. (Of course, it's not the only relevant element in our decision process!).
It makes sense to remove or add friction sometimes:
Remove friction: Amazon removed all friction between the moment you think about buying a product and actually buying the product, with the 1-Click Checkout button.
Add friction: A parking lot is gated (= friction added) because it's part of the payment process (get a ticket to know the time of entrance) and to control the number of cars (get a ticket to count the number of cars inside).
So friction can be an unnecessary evil, but it can also be a useful tool.
The key is to know how to use that tool.
Let's see how friction is relevant to our compliance practice.
Frictions in compliance
From a compliance perspective, friction prevents employees - or makes it hard on them - to perform a specific task or behavior.
So, you have two kinds of opportunities to decrease compliance risk:
You make it easy for employees to do something: remove friction.
You make it difficult for employees to do something: add friction.
To find these opportunities, we must first map all friction in a business process.
And that's what this Mini Guide is all about!
Friction mapping: how?
🎯 Find a target behavior
⚡️ Find the starting point
➤ Describe all steps from starting point to the target behavior
🚧 Describe all frictions employees may have in each step (structural 🚧 and cognitive 🧠 frictions)
👍 Figure out how changing these frictions will lead to the target behavior.
To explain this, I have made a case study.
Case study: economic sanctions
Companies don't want to mess with economic sanctions.
You don't want to do business with a company that is listed on a sanctions regulation.
You don't want to do business with a company who does business with a company who does business with a company who does business with a company that is listed, too (this is called an indirect violation of the sanctions regulations).
The business process we choose = prospection by Sales.
The compliance goal = to detect red flags (signals that indicate a sanctions risk) as early in the process as possible. But without unnecessarily blocking or slowing down the business process.
So without further ado, here is the Friction Mapping Case Study: Compliance With Economic Sanctions.
(If you can't view the template above like on a smartphone, use this link.)
You will notice how compliance measures are complementary and serve different goals.
My advice
The title of this Mini Guide starts indeed intentionally with "15min of work".
What I mean is: Don't overthink it.
✍️ Jot down your first thoughts in this template for max. 15min.
📆 Revisit the template a few days later and take another 15min.
🙅♀💁♀️🙆♀️ Discuss it with a few colleagues from different departments.
🧪 Experiment and amend depending on results.
🔁 Repeat for other business processes.
Good luck!