Let's stop with the narrative that poor records management leads to bad things.

Until we have something to say about HOW records are created, and whether they are consumed.

I keep seeing people posting on social media about how xyz problem was caused by poor records management.

Then I go and see how most of us are practicing records management, and I can't see anything that would have prevented anything that's happened, from happening.

This is because for most of us, records management is something that happens after "the business" has created "the records" - then our job of managing them starts.

In almost all of the cases I see from royal commissions to corruption enquiries, this brand of records management wouldn't have made one iota of difference.

If this is the brand of records management that we want to keep doing, we should stop with the narrative that records management stops all these bad things - because it just doesn't.

If we really want records management to be effective at stopping bad things from happening though, we need to be involved right down to the process level - in all the decisions about what records should be kept, where and how, and how risks should be managed using them.

The reason is simple, people can't take the kinds of actions that stop bad things happening, unless they're consuming the records, and the records can't be consumed unless they're created.

Until we have a view on ensuring that the records are created AND consumed, almost all the stories we tell about how records stops bad things happening are going to be fallacies - and everyone else knows it, so it just makes us look foolish.

I'm not saying anything here that we shouldn't all already know.

Probably the biggest change (at least for me) when ISO15489:2016 was introduced, was that it contained a section on appraisal that covers all of the activities I've just talked about - and more.

It just appears that mostly, we're not doing it.

How many bad things need to happen for us to get of our moral high horses and into the trenches where people actually need help from experts in creating records?