Limited transparency during safety issues
Poor integration of safety and customer service teams
FA-09
Compliance-Experience Tradeoff
Systemic Anatomy
Systemic Description
External security, identity verification, and regulatory requirements are implemented as rigid procedural blockers rather than integrated into the service flow as enablers.
Root Cause Type
Regulatory Implementation Approach
Why It Recurs
Security and Legal teams operate with veto authority over customer experience without CX representation; compliance is treated as binary (compliant/non-compliant) rather than a design challenge.
Governance Failure
Siloed security/compliance design processes; lack of investment in enabling technologies (biometrics, digital identity verification) that could resolve the tradeoff.
Scope Boundary
Does not explain internal policy choices or operational standards. Only explains friction driven by external regulatory or security mandates and their implementation.
Structural Risk Profile
Decision Frequency
low
How often decisions of this type are made in the affected context.
Blast Radius
systemic
The scope and scale of impact when this friction manifests.
Reversibility
locked-in
The ease with which decisions affected by this friction can be undone.
Time to Impact
immediate
The delay between decision and observable consequence.
Decision Fallout
Typical Decisions
- Implementing the strictest interpretation of regulations to minimize organizational liability
- Refusing digital credential acceptance due to lack of verification tooling investment
Delayed Effects
- Customer stress and anxiety at security/verification checkpoints
- Operational bottlenecks that slow the entire service flow
Early Warning Signals
- Long queues forming at ID/document verification points while other areas remain empty
- Customer confusion about varying documentation requirements across locations
Manifestations
Inadequate pre-flight document verification
Limited investment in compliance verification tools
Poor accessibility of facilities
Poor compliance with accessibility standards
Unclear safety protocols
Inadequate simulation and drilling
Limited transparency during incidents
Limited transparency in safety reporting
Inadequate emergency procedure communication
Poor staff training on safety procedures
Unclear evacuation procedures
Poor maintenance of safety equipment
Resolution Boundary
Decision Level
executive
This friction requires executive-level resolution because it involves mediating between security, legal, and customer experience functions with competing priorities and organizational power. The necessary technology investments and cross-functional design process changes require executive authority to override security and legal veto power and mandate integrated compliance design.
This friction cannot be resolved locally.
Type of Change Required
Cross-Functional Compliance Design Integration
- Friction continues when security and legal teams design compliance implementation without customer experience representation. The change required involves restructuring compliance design processes to include mandatory CX participation with decision influence, not just consultation.
Enabling Technology Investment Authorization
- This friction persists because compliance is implemented through manual procedural controls rather than technology-enabled verification. The required change involves capital allocation for technologies such as biometrics or digital identity verification that resolve the security-convenience trade-off rather than forcing a choice between them.
Regulatory Interpretation Governance
- Rigid implementation persists when organizations default to strictest possible interpretation of regulations to minimize liability. The friction continues until governance frameworks are established that explicitly evaluate implementation options across both compliance and experience dimensions with balanced risk assessment.
What Does Not Work
- Adding more staff to checkpoints treats capacity as the constraint when the actual constraint is procedural architecture. More staff can only incrementally improve throughput of an inherently sequential, friction-generating process.
- Informing customers about documentation needs fails when the root issue is the rigidity and anxiety of verification processes themselves, not customer preparation. Education addresses a downstream symptom while leaving intact the upstream procedural blocker.
- Attempts to make manual verification faster fail because they preserve the structural constraint of human-performed identity checks. Streamlining cannot eliminate the fundamental bottleneck created by sequential manual processing during peaks.
AERIM
AERIM is the operating system designed to resolve the structural conditions described above. It addresses the governance, coordination, and decision architecture failures that the Friction Atlas documents. AERIM operates at the resolution boundary where local fixes fail and systemic change is required.