Records and how to disrupt a war
If you want to experience an exercise in futility, try and organise anything involving more than two people without using any recorded information.
That means you can't use text messages, email, calendar invitations, post it notes, instant messages, or anything involving a pen.
You'll think "that's fine, I'll just make a phone call" - but you'll need to remember any phone numbers you're going to dial - because records are out, and a contact list is information that you recorded.
Over in the ukraine a the moment, a war is being fought.
Want to disrupt it?
Just work out how to destroy the ability of either side to record the information that they're using to coordinate their activity.
Pretty quickly they'll start to run out of food or bullets, or they'll start falling victim to friendly fire when recording the location of troops on a map is out, and they have to rely on memory.
If you want to know how to disrupt the records profession and the organisations we work in, it's one simple principle - focus on how people organise themselves, and how they can be more organised.
The only way to be more organised is through improving the quality of the information people record to coordinate activity.
If you start on this journey and find yourself talking about retention management, just remember that people with wars to fight, and group activities to organise don't care about retention management.
You should find comfort in the fact that if you can get people to start producing high quality records, they'll retain them anyway.
If you can't get them to start producing high quality records, the crap they're producing won't be worth keeping, and they'll be too disorganised for any retention plan to work.