Documentation drift is not negligence. It is the natural consequence of competent people solving problems faster than they can describe them.
A workaround becomes a habit. A habit becomes the process. The written record stays where it was, and nobody experiences a problem — until the person who held the real process in their head moves on.
Teams describe what they intend to do, not what they actually do. Ask five people to walk through the same process and you will typically get five accounts that agree on the outcome and diverge on every step in between.
The divergence is the finding. It is also the part that never appears in a self-assessment.
In onboarding time. In audit remediation. In the extra week a transaction takes because nobody can evidence how an approval was reached. In decisions that are quietly delayed because the leadership team does not trust the underlying numbers enough to move.
Reconcile the documented process against the observed process on a fixed cadence, using someone who did not write either. Record the differences as findings rather than corrections, so the pattern of drift becomes visible over time.
The goal is not perfect documentation. It is a known and bounded distance between record and reality.