Your Monday Move: Run a Curiosity Audit
If things feel more complex than they should right now — slower closings, closing document rebuilds because terms weren’t fully captured, more “who owns this?” moments — this week, get curious about the friction.
In commercial lending, friction rarely announces itself as a crisis. It shows up as rekeying borrower information multiple times and hoping there are no typos. It shows up as exceptions tracked in spreadsheets outside the core system. Each instance feels manageable in isolation. But together, they create drag on your team, on your borrowers, and on your balance sheet.
A lot of leaders assume that if a process has “worked” for years, the safest move is to leave it alone. But while some institutions cling to manual workflows, others are redesigning theirs — compressing cycle times, reducing touchpoints, and lowering operational risk. Avoiding change may feel conservative, but in reality it quietly builds risk: more errors, more compliance exposure, more burnout, and more competitive erosion.
As leaders, our responsibility is to reduce fragility inside the system. So here’s a simple, actionable move for this week: run a curiosity audit. Block 30–60 minutes, pull one recently closed deal (ideally one that felt typical), and walk through it step by step.
Write those friction points down in a straightforward list. By the end of the session, you’ll likely see a pattern — and that pattern is your opportunity. In most institutions, eliminating even one or two recurring friction points can reduce cycle time, lower operational risk, and improve both borrower and employee experience.
Here are three questions to get curious about:
1. Where are we relying on heroics?
In commercial lending, complexity is normal—but heroics shouldn’t be. When consistent success depends on a few experienced lenders, credit officers, or ops managers stepping in to “make it happen,” that’s not a talent advantage—it’s a process gap.
Where heroics are required, the system and workflow aren’t doing the work they should be. That’s your signal to design something repeatable and documented instead of relying on institutional memory.
Ask yourself:
- Which loans only fund on time because someone chases missing credit memos, appraisals, or signatures at the last minute?
- Who “knows how to push it through credit” or navigate policy gray areas?
- If that person is out for a week, what approvals will stall?
- Where do lenders say, “Just send it to me, I’ll take care of it,” because they know the internal shortcuts?
- How often does closing week involve after-hours coordination between credit, legal, ops, and relationship managers?
When the same individuals are always absorbing the friction, your workflow isn’t doing its job. The strongest institutions I’ve worked with scale through clear ownership, defined checkpoints, and systems that move deals forward without requiring someone to “babysit” every step.
If outcomes depend on experience alone, you don’t have a scalable process; you have institutional fragility.
2. Where are we rekeying data?
Commercial lending means data passing through countless hands. Repeated manual entry of the same borrower info, collateral, covenants, or rates into disjointed systems drags everything down while compounding compliance risks.
Ask yourself:
- Where is the same borrower or loan data entered more than once (LOS → credit memo → doc prep → core → servicing)?
- Which teams maintain “shadow spreadsheets” because the system doesn’t quite do what they need?
- Where are we manually copying information from PDFs or emails instead of pulling from a validated source of truth?
- How often do funding delays, booking errors, or post-closing fixes trace back to incorrect manual entry?
- During audits or exams, how much time is spent reconciling data across systems?
When multiple teams manually touch the same data, your workflow is merely stitched together. And if it hinges on manual rekeying, you’re exposed operationally. Target these pain points with integration, automation, and unified data flows.
3. Where do exceptions go to live forever?
Every credit culture has exceptions. That’s not the issue. The issue is when exceptions live in inboxes instead of in the system.
A policy deviation gets approved in an email.
A covenant tweak gets discussed on a call.
A collateral nuance gets handled “just this once.”
And then it disappears.
Sound familiar?
Ask yourself:
- Where are policy exceptions approved? In a workflow, or in email threads?
- If I asked for a report of all exceptions granted in the last 90 days, could we produce one quickly?
- How often do similar exceptions recur without being formalized into updated guidance?
- Are lenders relying on memory to recall how something was handled last time?
- During exam prep, how much time is spent reconstructing why something was approved?
When exceptions slip outside the process, they become invisible risks, both operationally and for compliance. In my years partnering with top lenders, I’ve seen the most resilient ones standardize data flows against policy or explicitly route and track them right in the workflow.
What to Do With This
Realizing these patterns make modernization a straightforward win: fluid workflows, fewer mistakes, no more heroics.
Run this audit. You’ll know exactly where to focus.
CEO at GoDocs
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