Four questions about the promise of records management to help your organisation get clear on it.

If you can make the decision, you make the decision.

If you can't make the decision, you have to sell it to someone who can.

This means that the vast majority of us are selling records all the time - because we don't have the authority to make decisions about what people do, and even when we do, we don't have the authority to enforce them.

So we have to sell it.

At the most basic level, sales is just about promises.

You promise that if someone gives you some kind of resource, some form of benefit will follow on from that decision. If that doesn't sound like something you do, just remember that the most basic resource we all have is time, and mostly what we need for records to work, is a commitment of time from other people.

Here are a few questions that will help you get clear on what you offer to your organisation, and what your organisation thinks of it.

What is the promise that you're making for records?

How clear and unambiguous is the promise?

Being clear on these two questions will help you clarify your own thinking, and help you limit misunderstandings, and it will help you with consistency. One of the largest problems in sales comes from ambiguous messaging, and we have this problem in records - because we haven't been clear on the promise, everyone is going around making it up for themselves.

Those two questions were inwardly focused - you and your message. The next two are focused on what other people think.

If you ask the people who are the target of the promise, what promise do they tell you records makes to them?

If you ask people who are the target of the promise, do they feel like the promise was delivered?

Understanding the answers to these two questions will help you understand whether you're promising something you can deliver, and what the legacy of records management has been in the past.

If you get answers you don't want to the second set of questions, there are only two possible things it can be -

1. You 've made a promise you can't keep

2. You're dealing with legacy issues.

If it's the first, it's about delivery - and you either need to change your promise, or change your practice.

If it's the second, it's a geology problem - it's about time and pressure. Keep pushing with the same message and delivery, and eventually you'll turn it around.