When Compliance Workarounds Backfire

Companies facing new regulations often reach for minimal compliance — narrow fixes that preserve the business model. But in algorithmic businesses, such fixes leave auditable traces and can spread beyond leaders’ control, inviting the very redesign they tried to avoid. Drawing on cases involving Glovo, Deliveroo, Airbnb, Uber, and Meta, the authors identify four signals that tell leaders when a workaround will hold — and when to prepare for a costly redesign.