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Loss aversion is the idea that people fear losing things more than they will enjoy the gain from something new.

A Nobel prize was awarded for work in this field for a paper called “prospect theory – an analysis of decisions under risk”. What is says is that the gain we make from a purchase has to be “worth” 2.3x more than whatever we’re giving up to make that purchase (generally money) – or we won’t make the purchase.

This is problematic for records.

We are always proposing a loss of control.

We are almost never proposing a gain that will be felt by the person whose control we are taking.

I think that people respond exactly the way that the psychology research tells us they will – they hoard. They used to hoard in their office – paper under desks, in file cabinets, on desks etc. Now they hoard digitally.

While an argument could be made that the move from custodial approaches has made this less of a problem, I’m not sure that’s true.

We still see troves of records on people’s hard drives and practically anywhere else they can organise information for themselves and control placement. The volume is higher, and the challenge of figuring out what is redundant, outdated or trivial is just as low on the priority risk.

I think this behavior is a cue for us that we’re missing something. I think it’s an existential question for records – how can we present larger gains to people we need to do the record keeping?

Do you keep a near miss register for Records?

A near miss in records should be a time when policy wasn’t followed and the organisation was exposed to a specific risk – without that risk becoming an incident or a loss.

Near miss reporting is a common practice in safety management. It’s there to expose all of those times that the organisation avoids an incident because it is lucky rather than because it did things properly. I think it’s probably a useful tool that will help us deal with our creeping problems by identifying and giving us data on the leading indicators of major failure.

The idea is simple – every time we have a problem because policy wasn’t followed, we record it. This doesn’t mean that we record every file that’s on a file server somewhere – because no one cares about that until theres an actual problem. It means that we record the times when that kind of practice exposed the organisation to a specific risk. It’s a way of starting to understand the magnitude of the creeping problem of records non-compliance.

I don’t think anyone would disagree that records compliance is a creeping problem for lots of organisations. Every corruption report and every royal commission lists records being falsified, accessed improperly, not kept or otherwise ignored as a part of the problem that lead to the investigation.

I think a near miss register provides a tool that could turn these problems into hard data problems that executives can’t ignore (or have to specifically ignore).

I think that ultimately, we have two options – one is to report on the near misses, and hopefully find a solution. The other is to wait until there’s a catastrophic failure – as we’ve often seen. At that point, the records will be needed, and if they aren’t there, and we can’t show the data we provided over and over again to highlight the problem, we will have to accept a level of blame.

The idea of a near miss might be a bit nebulous, so here are a few examples of the kinds of things I mean –

1. The time a record required for an FOI (or royal commission) was in a repository where users have uncontrolled delete privileges.
2. That time we audited HR and found that they were keeping confidential information on a file server with no access control.
3. That time IT had to restore a file share because records were deleted to make way for a new project repository.

In each case, the organisation was exposed to a specific risk by a violation of policy.

I don’t think this is a magic bullet, but I think it’s one more tool that we can use to start turning the tide.

If this is something that you do, or an idea that you like – please email me or leave a comment, I’d like to see how well it works for you.

Records are important.

Data is important (sometimes).

So why is data getting all the investment, when at some level, all records are data and data of any importance is a record? I think it’s down to one thing.

People value what they rely on.

Data people are busy creating things that people will rely on.

Data people are focusing on urgent problems, and because of the nature of investment, they’re being hired for to organisational needs that are both urgent, and important.

Records is important, and always will be. But always is a very long time, and the truth is that most of what we keep simply isn’t important, and won’t have value – ever.

Data people have embraced the idea that what they’re doing has to be seen to have value now, or they just don’t get funded.

A lot of what we do is to manage information that only gets touched twice – once when it is stored, and again when it is batched for destruction. In between those events is a huge opportunity.

Within the records we keep is every decision the organisation has ever made, and the information they used to make it.

The next generation of great records managers are going to get funded by ensuring that people making decisions are relying on records to understand how they should make the decision.

The more people rely on our records of the past, the more value they will have into the future, and the more funding we will get.

This is more of an informal survey than a blog post. I’m really interested in what you think. If you comment, I’ll add your answers to the end of this post.

How do you keep score?

How do you know when you’re winning?

What’s the metric that lets you go home at the end of a week/month/year knowing you’ve done well?

I’m going to update this page with everyone’s comments. I think it’s an important issue for all of us.

The critical skill that makes or breaks every records program is the ability to get managers to manage the records performance of their direct reports.

When frontline managers include records in their management practice, frontline workers keep records.

When middle managers manage frontline managers on the records performance of their team, frontline managers teams keep records.

When senior executives manage middle managers on the records performance of their frontline teams, the whole organisation underneath them keep records.

This makes the ability to persuade senior executives to take records seriously a critical skill.

In Government in particular, single managers can derail whole records programs – and the same goes for digital initiatives. If you’ve been around long enough, you’ve seen this in action.

I’ve seen one side of an organisation move to electronic records and another side stay on paper – because one senior executive liked their EA to print documents for them, and liked signing ceremonies on Friday mornings.

I’ve also seen the records performance of a team completely change (in both directions), because of a change of manager.

While the ability to persuade on a 1:1 basis at low levels of an organisation can have an impact, it’s only a matter of time before that 1 runs into a deadline set by their manager and doesn’t keep a record because the manager doesn’t care about the record.

There are many approaches to this problem – but the most important thing is that we see it as a critical problem for records to solve.

The other option is to say “it’s not my job to persuade” – which is partly true, and partly why records is a mess in many organisations. Most people I’ve found with this attitude didn’t get there because they don’t care, they got there because they care deeply and tried and failed many, many times. 

All of this leaves me with two questions:

1. What’s your general approach to persuading management?
2. How have you found inspiration when you’ve become that person who failed to persuade?

I’m regularly told that people want the google experience at work.

I know what they mean.

They mean “we want to find what we want”.

But Google isn’t actually very good at this when what you want is a specific thing.

Where Google excels is search problems where we can define the search problem as:

1. Show me something popular.
2. Show me some information about a thing, I don’t really care where it comes from – just that it’s popular.
3. Show me some information about a thing, I don’t really care if it’s trustworthy or not, just that lots of people link to it.
4. Show me some information, I don’t care whether or not it’s findable in a week or a month.

Google solves the problem of finding what’s popular, now.

Business search problems though, are almost always about what’s unpopular, specific and authoritative.

And Google isn’t very good at those.

For what it’s worth, Google recognises that the search it provides isn’t the right search for every situation, it’s why we have Google Scholar.

The largest opportunity of “born-digital” records, is to make the business value of records “very soon, to me”.

Records are more valuable when they’re more useful.

When they’re critical on a day to day basis, they get executive support, investment and care.

Process workers treat them with reverence, and invest time in them.

They are valued.

Business value of records has always been difficult. 

The value of keeping records has often been “just in case” it “might be valuable” to “someone”

The prize though, is now, and has always been “very soon, to me.”

When we take our eye off this, organisations invent whole other professions to do it. 

Not making the value of our records “very soon, to me” is an existential threat to the Records Management profession.

What will be sad about this, is that there’s an up-swing in the recognition of the value of good records going on right now.

For the last three years, I’ve had a Google alert on a couple of topics around Record Keeping and Management.

What has been really surprising is that the academic papers coming through aren’t papers about records.

This excerpt is from a paper titled “Strategies for Quality Milk Production”

v) Proper record management and goals for udder health status 

Proper record keeping is the essence of proper monitoring. Periodic review of the udder health management programme helps in timely corrective interventions. Establishment of realistic periodic targets for various udder health parameters is the final step of a complete udder health management program. The goals should be realistic.

This is about records that have value “very soon, to me”.

That’s the prize.

Either we will capture it, or another profession will.

Is to control record creation.

If we’re not controlling record creation, we can’t control quality.

In practical terms, not having control of creation means records:

1. Are likely to be in places we don’t know about or can’t control.
2. Might not have sufficient metadata for us to judge their evidentiality.

To me, these are core problems that we’re all dealing with in records, I think it’s because we don’t have enough control over creation.

Simple – remove yourself and anyone else from Records from the buying process.

For decades, Records systems have been purchased based on their ability to meet the needs of Records.

And for decades, records has struggled with getting ordinary business users to adopt the systems and policies.

Of course we have. We’ve been buying systems for us.

So what happens after purchase of the system we’ve bought for us?

Our life with the system is easy.

Business users lives with the systems are hard.

So we adopt the system.

And they don’t.

Records has to answer two questions:

1. When do our obligations end?
2. What value can the past offer us tomorrow? 

To do records adequately, we have to have a plan to record our obligations until they are no longer our obligations.

To do records well, we have to have a strategy for how the past can have value in the future.

But what does great look like?