What stale SOPs cost growing teams
Stale SOPs slow onboarding, create duplicate questions, and make every team depend on the same few people for context.
The cost hides inside everyday work
When SOPs drift, the impact rarely shows up as one obvious failure. It shows up as slower onboarding, repeated questions, inconsistent handoffs, and managers becoming the routing layer for basic operational knowledge.
The fix is not more documentation volume. The fix is a system that notices when the way people work has changed and routes the update back to the source of truth.