How to diagnose records management errors

For my money, Chris Argyris was one of the smartest management thinkers ever.

He was part of the organisational learning movement, and had a lot to say about things that stop organisations learning - particularly when those things are ways of dealing with ideas that the organisation finds unbearable.

According to Chris Argyris, an "error is any mismatch between what we intend an action to produce and what actually happens when we implement an action."

Learning is the process of detection and correction of errors.

Basically, learning is a match between what we intend, and what we get.

A few errors that I see regularly -

- Implementation of a records system on the basis that it will lead to high quality recordkeeping - when it actually leads to garbage being kept somewhere new (but with great metadata for said garbage).

- Implementation of a BCS on the basis that it will lead to easy filing of records - when it actually confuses people and leads to them either mis-filing within the BCS or filing somewhere else entirely.

- Implementation of a metadata schema that considers all future uses for the information on the basis that it will make records easy to find - when what it actually does is turn people off using the records system at all.

What makes these a problem isn't that they happen, it's the story that we tell ourselves about why they happen.

Generally it goes something like "users won't do what they're supposed to."

Sometimes the story is true.

Sometimes though, the story stops getting from a mis-match between what we intended and what happened, to a match.

Chris Argyris was also big on understanding defensive routines.

Defensive routines are what happen when we have a story and a routine that stops us from seeing the truth.

The truth is that a lot of our practices produce errors, and we keep doing them.

We fail to learn.

Every action has a theory behind it.

The theory says "if I do x, y will happen."

ie. if I implement a BCS, stuff will be easy to place and find.

Lots of our theories though, don't produce results.

And we keep doing them.

The first step in diagnosing records management errors, is learning to see the story we are telling ourselves.

The second is recognising when the story isn’t true because the action doesn’t produce the outcome we want.

Then we just have to make a choice - do we take responsibility for the error, and change, or do we tell ourselves a story about how it’s someone else’s fault?