When I was young my family bought a fish tank.
It was bigger than a fish bowl, but not by much. It was just large enough for a couple of fish, some plants, a light, a water filter and a pump. Everything you need for fish to live more than a few days or so we thought.
Having a fish tank was a great way for us kids to learn about fish. We learned that you shouldn’t overfeed them, and some fish don’t get along with other fish. We also learned that owning fish was more than just buying a tank with all the accessories; we needed to build a sustainable ecosystem for them to survive.
However, the most important lesson we learned was that life in a fish tank is not the same as living in the ocean. Although our fish tank was better than a fish bowl, it could not duplicate life as it really was for the fish we had. It had many of the characteristics but not all of them, at least not the essential ones.
Our fish tank was a model of the real world, but not the world itself. As the British statistician George Box wrote, “All models are wrong, some are useful.”
And that’s what we learned from our family fish tank. They are useful but not the same as the real thing.
Compliance and Fish Tanks
As someone who has now spent years working in compliance, I’ve observed that many have not learned this important lesson. Many find it too easy to fall into the trap of oversimplification – much like mistaking an aquarium for the vast complexity of marine ecosystems.
Compliance has its own fish tanks, its own models built from frameworks, management standards, processes, and procedures. However, just like our family fish tank, these models are simplifications of the real world, but not the world itself.
For compliance to succeed, it must move beyond the fish tank and start doing compliance in the real world. This requires that compliance learn two things about fish tanks that also apply to compliance:
A fish tank is not an ocean, and
An ocean is not a fish tank.
A Fish Tank is not an Ocean
To achieve the outcome of compliance, organizations make use of controlled structures and processes defined by policies, manuals, procedures, and work instructions often codified into computer programs and automation systems.
Organizations take great comfort in these systems, believing they have captured the essence of what’s needed to meet all their obligations within the carefully constructed boundaries of their compliance fish tank.
But here’s the thing.
Just as a fish tank is not an ocean, compliance systems, no matter how well defined, are not the same as business reality.
That’s why we use phrases such as work-as-imagined and work-as-done. It’s also why Taiichi Ohno (the father of Lean) encourages us to do Gemba walks. Go to the scene of where value is created and work is actually done.
Now, compliance systems are still useful and serve as valuable tools to provide necessary structure and controls, but they’re inherently simplified versions of what a business does or needs to do. If you ever wondered why your compliance is not effective, it may be a result of having oversimplified models – fish bowls instead of fish tanks.
In the CYNEFIN framework’s terminology, systems transform what is inherently complex into something that is simplified yet still complicated, but more easily managed.
Systems exchange a measure of uncertainty for a measure of certainty.
However, this certainty is the certainty of a fish tank, not the certainty that comes from mastering how to navigate the ocean.
An Ocean is not a Fish Tank
Navigating the ocean is not the same as navigating your fish tank.
Perhaps the greatest risk in compliance isn’t having incomplete systems or models – it’s attempting to force business reality to conform to them by putting it in a box or rather, a fish tank.
The history of the Canadian fisheries serves as a sobering example. Their double failure – first in mismanaging natural fisheries through oversimplified models, then in attempting to replicate controlled aquarium conditions through fish farming – demonstrates how forcing reality to fit our models can lead to undesirable outcomes.
This phenomenon manifests in several dangerous ways:
Over-regulation: Creating excessive rules and requirements that ignore the dynamic nature of organizational behaviour
Rigid Framework Application: Treating frameworks as unchangeable mandates rather than adaptive guidelines
Checkbox Mentality: Reducing compliance to a series of binary yes/no conditions
Standardization Without Context: Applying one-size-fits-all solutions to unique situations
Just as an ocean is not a fish tank, business reality is not the same as our management systems or frameworks. The territory we must learn to navigate is not the extent of what is written on a map, specified in our models, or defined in our documentation.
We need to use models to help us navigate the real world, not replace the real world by our models. Another way of saying this is that:
we don’t live in our models, and neither do our businesses.
How to Navigate Compliance in the Real World
So how do we navigate compliance without falling into the aquarium trap? How do we effectively uses models and systems without putting our businesses into a fish tank or believing that all we need to do is navigate the fish tank that we create?
Here are a few principles that can help you:
Embrace Complexity - Acknowledge that compliance exists within complex adaptive systems. Unlike an aquarium, real-world compliance involves countless interactions between people, processes, and changing environments.
Practice Adaptive Management - Instead of rigid frameworks, develop flexible systems that can respond to changing conditions. Monitor, learn, and adjust continuously in real time.
Maintain Perspective- Use models as tools for understanding, not as blueprints for reality. They should inform decisions, not dictate them.
Foster Ecological Thinking- Consider the entire ecosystem in which compliance operates. This includes organizational culture, human behaviour, market forces, and societal changes.
Build Resilience- Design compliance systems that can withstand unexpected shocks and adapt to new challenges, rather than optimizing for a single, controlled state (i.e. Don’t build compliance as a fish tank).
Looking Forward
The future of compliance lies not in creating perfect models or controlled systems, but in developing approaches that respect and work with the inherent complexity of real-world systems.
We must remain humble enough to acknowledge that our models, like fish tanks, are useful simplifications – not complete representations of reality.
As compliance professionals, our role isn’t to make organizations into aquariums but to develop better ways of understanding and working with the ocean of business. This means creating adaptive frameworks that can evolve with changing conditions while maintaining their core protective and certainty function.
Remember: The compliance goal isn’t to simplify businesses until it fits in a tank – it’s to build the capability to navigate the vast, complex waters of real-world operations while always staying on mission, between the lines, and ahead of risk.