Recognising how hard records management is and the impact that difficulty has on our work

I'd bet that every single one of the people reading this is an expert in records management.

I'd bet all of you look at the tools and techniques of records management and think it all makes sense, and it's all easy.

If you want a great sense of the super power that your expertise gives you, you can't go far wrong reading the work of Gary Klein on Recognition Primed Decision making.

It's amazing work - and highlights a consistent pattern that shows up in lots of other places.

Gary went looking for rational models of decision making.

The rational model of decision making says that when people are going to make a decision, they look at the situational factors, consider all available solutions, rank them, and then choose the one that ranks the best based on objective criteria.

Gary wanted to see this model in action so he could study it.

What makes the work great, is that Gary didn't find that model.

He started looking with fire ground commanders - people who manage groups of firefighters when they're putting out fires.

It's a life and death role - the difference between good decisions and bad ones can literally be measured in how many people die.

SO no one gets there until they are an acknowledged expert.

He kept seeing them make decisions, and then when he asked them about their process afterwards - 'what options did you consider' etc. he found there weren't any.

What he ended up realising, was that because these people were experts, they could see patterns that non-experts couldn't.

When they saw them, they just knew what to do about them.

Even when they weren't immediately sure, there still wasn't an option evaluation.

What there was instead, was a mental simulation - they would match the pattern, and then mentally simulate possible ways to address the pattern they saw.

When they found one, they would act on it.

The more work that has been done on that pattern of decision making, the stronger the understand has become, that experts see patterns others can't, and act in ways that other's don't understand as a result - and produce superior results because they can do so.

Why is this relevant to records?

Because like any other expert group, our expertise means that we can see patterns that others can't.

They're obvious to us.

They're as plain as the nose on our faces.

They're easy to respond to.

They're plain as day - so only some kind of moron won't be able to see them.

And there's why they're both a superpower, and our achilles heel.

Because we can see the pattern, know what to do with it, and it's as simple as breathing, we expect that it will be as simple as breathing for others too.

And if they'd taken ten, twenty or fifty years to learn what we have, it would be.

Not understanding this fact leads to massive damage for records management.

It means we ask people to do things that they just can't do, based on patterns that they just can't see.

When they can't take the actions they can't do, based on the patterns they just can't see, what happens?

Generally, we make what is called the fundamental attribution error.

The fundamental attribution error is a cognitive attribution bias in which people overemphasise personal factors, and underemphasise situational and environmental factors.

In practice, this means that rather than looking at them and saying 'we've asked them to do a task they don't understand, based on a pattern they can't see', we look at them and say 'they lack intelligence' or 'they're lazy' - or some other negative thing that attributes the poor result to factors about them as people.

The thing that is worth contemplating, is that when it's one person, we might be right - there are always a couple of people in every organisation who aren't the sharpest tools, or aren't particularly motivated.

When we're talking about large swathes of our organisations though, or the whole organisation, we might want to consider the statistical likelihood that we are in organisations full of unintelligent and unmotivated people.

When we make this error, we are making the first error in a vicious cycle.

When we attribute failure to do what we want to some combination of laziness and/or lack of intelligence, the solutions we come up with, are solutions that are designed to fix some combination of laziness and/or lack of intelligence.

So we try and solve a problem that doesn't exist, or we stop trying to solve the problem - because if they can't understand it when it's so simple, why should we try?

How does this make us look to the rest of the organisation?

It makes us look like we lack intelligence - because only people who lack intelligence want to spend time and money solving problems that don't exist.

Or it makes us look like we're lazy - because we stop trying to do the things that would make our work effective.

This is obviously amazingly ironic.

Acting based on a view that people are unintelligent or lazy causes to engage in actions that make the organisation perceive us as unintelligent and lazy.

And we wind ourselves into this vicious cycle, because the things we ask people to do are easy, based on patterns that are obvious.

To experts in records management.

In a custodial era, this wasn't a problem.

We had a kind of social contract with people - keep things in files, give them to us when you're done, and we'll give them back to you when you need them.

We were a service - we asked for one simple action, then we took on all of the problems required to deliver that outcome.

Doing this meant that we had to solve a set of quite complicated problems.

And we did - by developing a complicated set of tools that let us efficiently achieve the required outcomes.

The thing about complicated tools, is that they take time to master.

And when you finally do, you're an expert - who can see the patterns that the tools were designed to solve, and know how to solve them.

Then we left the custodial era.

And we started giving complicated tools to people who aren't experts, and have 40 hours a week in which they're supposed to do something else.

Which just means that our tools aren't fit for use by them - give a non-expert a complicated tool and expect them to be able to use it like a pro, and you'll get poor results.

And if the last ten years of audit reports about records bear out anything, it's that we're getting bad results.

And if we keep making the fundamental attribution error, we will continue to get those results - because we will focus on problems that don't exist, or give up trying to solve them.

We have to recognise four things.

First - that we are experts, and we are valuable. We can see patterns others can't, and take action in ways that others can't.

Second - that our organisations are full of motivated experts. Almost every single person in our organisation has specific expertise that lets them see patterns that others can't, and they all get out of bed every day, come to work, and try and do it well.

Third - just as it would be unreasonable to expect us to do their jobs as well as they do them, it is unreasonable to expect them to do our jobs as well as we would.

Four - the tools we are asking them to use, were designed for experts to solve complicated problems, expecting them to produce good results for non-experts is a low probability strategy - as evidenced by our industry's generally low level of results.

Once we recognise those four things, we are more likely to be dealing with the world as it really is.

We can deal with the world like experts, recognising that our problems are hard to solve for people who are not experts.

From there, what we do is up to us.

We can develop simpler practices that can be executed by non-experts.

We can develop strategies to up-skill people over many years.

We can find tools that cross the gap that we used to use expertise for.

However we do it, the first step is to recognise and appreciate our own expertise, and the expertise of the people we now ask to do records management work, the impact of not doing so keeps us in a vicious cycle that ultimately destroys our ability to do good work, and deliver good results.