By Elaine Mullan
for the 2025 Risky Women Writing Competition, presented in partnership with Ocorian
Imagine Marie Kondo surrounded by outdated policies and compliance forms, asking, “Does this spark joy?” Who knew tidying up the chaotic world of GRC could require more than just a neatly folded T-shirt?
If you haven’t heard of Marie Kondo and her Kondomari 5 step method, including her mantra that items must ‘spark joy’ then let me introduce you. She’s an incredibly successful Japanese decluttering expert beloved of the media. So, I wondered what might happen if Marie Kondo took on the messy world of GRC? What would her solution be to filing cabinets harbouring out of date policies, ‘just in case’ controls that no longer fit or are in fashion, and cluttered risk registers that are a total buzzkill for even the most resilient compliance officer.
As someone who has tried (and failed, spectacularly) to follow Marie Kondo’s five steps of decluttering I see parallels everywhere between decluttering my kitchen drawers and decluttering GRC. Only in GRC, the stakes are a little higher. No one goes to prison because I can’t decide whether to keep the pasta maker or not.
So, what would happen if we KonMari’d GRC? Let’s got through Marie Kondo’s 5 steps.
Step 1. Commit yourself to tidying up
This means promising to do the work and keep going until you’re finished. In GRC, it means making a firm declaration to stop treating GRC like an annual spring clean.
We all know what can happen, firms dip in and out of governance projects depending on the regulator of the week or new ‘Dear CEO’ letter. Commitment means elevating compliance from being a tick-box exercise.
In GRC, you don’t really have a choice. If you only half-commit, the clutter creeps back and regulators may notice the mess.
Step 2. Imagine your ideal lifestyle
Marie Kondo starts by looking at her client’s current situation and then gets them to visualise the life they want to live before they start folding T-shirts into origami swans. For organisations this means understanding the vision and what well-governed and resilient looks like and behaves.
This is the moment to define your North Star, your ultimate measure of success. Do you want to be known as a company that goes beyond minimum standards? One that turns great GRC into an advantage? Or simply one that stays out of headlines for the wrong reasons?
For GRC to be meaningful, there needs to be this vision, and it needs to be articulated. Otherwise, you’re just reshuffling the paperwork.
Step 3: Finish discarding first
This is Kondo’s most radical instruction, don’t start organising until you’ve discarded everything that no longer sparks joy.
For compliance, you need to be ruthless. Chuck out those outdated policies, obsolete procedures and ‘we’ve always done it that way’ controls.
Unsuitable GRC is not just untidy, it’s dangerous. Outdated controls can give a false sense of security. Redundant procedures create noise that drowns out real issues. Discarding creates space for clarity.
Step 4: Tidy by category, not location
Kondo insists you tackle clutter by category, all books, all clothes etcetera rather than room by room. In GRC, this translates to managing risks holistically, not silo by silo.
We can swop in department for location and using this approach: HR owns this risk, IT owns that one, compliance documents theirs in another system. Resulting in duplication, blind spots and contradictions.
Avoiding using these functional groupings can help produce one version of the truth, one consistent taxonomy, one integrated approach. Regulators increasingly expect a coherent system of governance and not a disjointed, siloed, jigsaw approach. If you fix one department but not the others, risk just shifts location until it erupts somewhere else.
Step 5: Ask if it sparks joy
Marie Kondo’s famous catchphrase is ‘does it spark joy’, while clutching the item in question. If it doesn’t, then chuck it.
Joy in GRC is when governance is not a bureaucratic weight but a source of confidence. Employees know what’s expected. Leadership knows where risks lie. Regulators see transparency and accountability. That is joy.
In GRC, asking the joy question is a powerful filter for whether a control, a report or policy actually adds value.
The decluttered future
Of course, tidying up and decluttering GRC isn’t just about processes and frameworks, it’s about the very real pressures that keep compliance leaders awake at night. Those overlapping regulations, complexity of global compliance, rogue employee behaviour, regulatory change management and business misalignment, where strategy moves faster than compliance can adapt. Each of these factors are about navigating messiness, uncertainty and human behaviour.
Decluttering compliance is not about minimalism for its own sake. It’s about stripping away the noise so that what remains is fit for purpose, aligned and trusted. This approach to GRC can shift organisations from cluttered defensiveness to confident resilience.
Unlike my home where the clutter returns like clockwork, a well-structured compliance system sustains itself, provided leadership commits and culture carries it forward.
A final thought (or perhaps the plot twist)
When Marie Kondo had children, she admitted that her methods no longer worked!! Life got messy. Even with the best frameworks and intentions, governance and compliance are messy because people are messy. The reality is that there isn’t a permanently perfect state of order but a requirement for resilience and agility to absorb disorder and still find clarity and purpose within it. That’s the real art of sparking joy in GRC.
In the end, GRC will always be a bit untidy but what matters is that it still sparks trust. GRC is ultimately all about the people.