Hoping people have a bad day and the strategic power of records.

This is just something that I've noticed over the last few years.

We're expecting someone to come and save us - and make people do the right thing.

We also spend lots of time pointing to royal commissions and corruption enquires that mention recordkeeping and saying "see! See! Records are important."

In effect, what we've become is the discipline that hopes someone has a bad day so that we can become important again.

There is no question that we should make the most out of crises as they happen.

But confusing records with something that only exists to prevent bad days also leaves about 98% of the strategic power of records management on the table.

The core and single most important reason we keep records is because our memories are unreliable, and we can't share them.

Organising anything on the basis of memory alone, runs into problems very quickly.

For me - and many others I'm sure - the single most impactful record I keep is the outlook/gmail calendar.

The next most impactful is probably the meeting agenda - because then we all know why we're turning up at a meeting, and there's no confusion about what we're supposed to do.

The strategic power of records are in the simple principles of organising and managing work.

So much of organising and managing work just isn't possible without recording some kind of information to support it.

We shouldn't waste any crises, but we also have to make records about more than just stopping the bad stuff happening.

We have to recover the strategic power of records - and that's all about how people organise and manage their work.