Simon F.T. held the loupe to his eye, the brass threads of the 1932 fountain pen barrel resisting his touch just enough to remind him of its age. He had counted exactly 42 steps from his front door to the mailbox this morning, a ritual of precision that seemed increasingly at odds with the chaotic world outside his workshop. In the workshop, a leak was a failure of a seal, a clear mechanical break that required a specific, elegant solution. In the corporate offices he used to frequent, a leak was often ignored until it became a flood, at which point someone was handed a gold watch for drowning while holding a bucket.

What he didn’t mention-what he actively ignored-was that Peter, a junior analyst who spent his weekends hiking, had offered to write a Python script for that exact reporting process 12 months earlier. Peter was told, quite flatly, that the department didn’t have the ‘bandwidth for experimentation.’ The result? Sarah was rewarded for being a human bridge between two incompatible software systems, while Peter was viewed as someone who wasn’t ‘all in’ because he refused to make a show of his struggle.

The Bent Nib Metaphor

Simon F.T. adjusted the nib, feeling the slight scratch of gold against paper. He thought about the 52 pens currently sitting in his ‘in-tray.’ Some were there because their owners had tried to force them to work when they were clogged. Instead of cleaning them, they pressed harder.

That is exactly what we do in compliance departments across the globe. When the data doesn’t flow, we don’t fix the pen; we just press harder until the nib bends and the paper tears.

The Cost of Inefficiency

I once worked with a firm that spent $1002 every month on coffee and late-night catering for the compliance team during the quarterly audit. It was seen as a badge of honor. The ‘Audit War Room’ was a place of legend.

Yet, when a proposal was put forward to integrate a centralized data lake that would have reduced the audit preparation time by 82 percent, the CFO balked at the upfront cost. It was easier to approve $1002 in sandwiches every month than to approve a one-time structural fix. The sandwiches were a variable cost of ‘hard work.’ The software was a capital expenditure that threatened the status quo.

The Paradox of Calm

We are afraid of effectiveness because effectiveness is quiet. It doesn’t stay late. It doesn’t send emails at 2:02 AM to show the boss it is still awake. Effectiveness looks like a person leaving the office at 5:02 PM because their systems worked exactly as designed. To a manager who measures value by the amount of visible stress on an employee’s face, a calm employee is a redundant employee.

The Manual Pivot Table Trap

This leads to a phenomenon I call ‘The Manual Pivot Table Trap.’ It’s the tendency to keep doing things the hard way because the hard way is defensible. If Sarah makes a mistake while manually entering data for 72 hours, she is forgiven because she was ‘working under immense pressure.’ If Peter’s script had a bug, he would be crucified for ‘relying on a machine.’

The Art of Necessary Movement

I once spent 62 days trying to convince a board that their ‘dedication to manual oversight’ was actually a liability. They looked at me as if I were suggesting they replace their hearts with clockwork. They couldn’t see that their hearts were already failing from the strain of doing things that should have been delegated to a simple circuit.

“A crisis is merely an inefficiency that has finally run out of time.”

In the realm of regulatory technology, there is a clear divide between those who want to solve the problem and those who want to be seen managing the problem. They are addicts of the manual process, thriving on the adrenaline of the ‘close call.’

The Promotion of Inefficiency

The Perfect Line

Simon F.T. finished the pen. He filled it with a deep, midnight blue ink and drew a single, perfect line across a scrap of parchment. No skips. No blots. Just a clean flow of information from the reservoir to the page. That is what effectiveness looks like. It isn’t dramatic. It doesn’t require a weekend of ‘heroics.’ It just requires the right tools, maintained by someone who values the result more than the struggle.

We have to ask ourselves: are we building departments of repair specialists who love the brokenness, or are we building systems that work? If we continue to praise the ‘weekend warriors’ of the manual spreadsheet, we are essentially subsidizing our own eventual failure. We are telling our best people that their intelligence is less valuable than their stamina.

The Necessary Shift

This transition requires tools designed for flow, not just monitoring. Consider how systems built on precise architecture challenge the status quo. For further reading on systemic improvement challenges, see the analysis on MAS digital advertising guidelines.

The 122 rows of a risk assessment shouldn’t be a gauntlet to be run; they should be a data set to be analyzed. If we can’t tell the difference between the two, we aren’t in the compliance business-we’re in the theater business. And the curtain is starting to look a little ragged around the edges.

I walked back from the mailbox today, counting the steps again. 42. It was the same as before. Consistency isn’t exciting. It doesn’t make for a thrilling story at the company retreat. But when I got back to my desk, the pen I had fixed worked on the first try. I didn’t have to shake it. I didn’t have to press hard. I didn’t have to stay up all night wondering if it would leak. I just wrote. And in that moment, I realized that the greatest form of respect you can show for a task is to make it as easy as possible to do it correctly.

We must move toward a model where ‘I finished my work in 2 minutes’ is met with a promotion, not a suspicious look and an extra pile of busywork. It’s time to stop the counting and start the fixing. It’s time to value the flow of the ink, not the sweat of the writer.