How your organisation reveals the records projects it actually wants

In economics, there are two ideas about what we buy that are a useful way to think about getting money in records management - ‘revealed preferences’ and ’stated preferences’.

The difference is pretty simple, if you ask someone about how they would spend money, the preferences they state will be different to the preferences they reveal if you follow them around and watch how they spend money.

It’s main utility for records managers, particularly in government, is helping to sort out whether what you have is a ‘yes’ or a ‘yes’.

I constantly talk to records managers who are convinced that the project they’ve put up is seen as important by their executive, and is something they want to do. The dissonance in the conversation, is that the project isn’t funded in July, if it gets funded at all, it gets funded after March - the part of the year in which the goal of many agencies shifts from funding priority projects, to spending their budgets so they don’t have to give it back.

While the organisation may be sincere in their desire to fund the project, in comparison to other projects, whatever it delivers is just not important. To me, I’ve always taken thought about this as the ‘soft no’ or ‘soft yes’ (depending on what kind of day I’ve had) - it’s the no you get when there are politics and regulators involved, and the agency wants to keep the door open on a project because if something goes wrong, or a regulator or auditor suddenly shows up, it can make the organisation look like they were already planning to do something.

To me, the decision about when to fund reveals what the organisation actually cares about. If you’re funded in the first round, the organisation genuinely wants what you are offering, if it doesn’t, it doesn’t want it - and it has revealed that to you by saying ‘yes’ on one hand, but deciding only to fund if there’s money left over from everything it does care about.

How you respond to that is entirely up to you, but if you have found yourself putting up the same projects year after year, and having your organisation saying on one hand ‘yes, we want to do this’, and then not doing it, it may be worth considering whether you have really understood the kind of value they want, and whether what you are asking for delivers on that.

One thing is clear - when an organisation actually wants something, it funds it. If it’s not funding it, it doesn’t want it.