Ensuring that when we do records management, we remember the game we're actually playing.

Often as I dress for a semi formal meeting (ie. put on a suit), I'll remind myself that it's ridiculous.

I live in Australia.

It's often 43 degrees in summer (that's 110 degrees fahrenheit).

Even in winter, it's still often 30 degrees.

And I go to work wearing long pants, a long sleeve shirt, and a jacket.

Basically I go to work in a slightly modernised version of victorian period dress.

It's totally inappropriate for the climate, and has no practical purpose related to the work.

And why?

Simply, it's a game we play.

Mostly, this game is called "fit in" - and it's a matching game.

If you turn up wearing similar clothes to everyone else, people get on with the job.

Steel cap boots and high visibility clothing for building sites, shirt and tie for the chief executive, cardigans for a records conference.

Turn up wearing something else, and people will question whether you belong there - and once they start questioning that, the questions are unlikely to end.

Where this idea of games we play is really important, is that often we get confused and think we're playing "records management."

When we need more money, we need to remember that we're playing "compete for funding."

When we need people to act in certain ways, we need to remember that we're playing "compete for management approval" and also a game of "compete for time."

If we think of these things as games, we can start to think about what the rules of those games might be, and what the different ways to win them are.

The game of "compete for funding" is also a game of "how many ways can we get to a plausible ROI," and "schmooze the right people." The right people are the people who can say yes to the project, and the people who can say no to the project - and the game here is "get their approval," which might also make it a game of "what do you need me to include in my project so that you'll support it" - which can also mean it's a game of "what's valuable to you at the moment."

This might all sound a bit silly.

But the point of it, is that if we go into the game of "compete for funding" and act like we're playing "records management" we're going to be playing by the wrong rules.

And we'll lose.

The other problem, is that when we look for expertise, we look for the wrong expertise.

We'll look for records management expertise, instead of "business case development" or "cost-benefit analysis" expertise.

We often make this huge mistake when we're designing classification schemes that people will need to navigate.

We think we're playing "design a classification scheme," when the game we're actually playing is "design a user interface," and because we don't realise that, we deprive ourselves of the knowledge that we can gain from user interface design - a discipline that has many more knowledge cycles than we do, and a set of techniques to help them get it right.

Because we get the game wrong, we habitually design user interfaces that confuse people, and ignore a whole discipline whose one job is to avoid confusing people.

All because we think the game we're playing is "records management."