Records can help people be better managers - and why that's bad for records management

One of the things that's surprised me over my records career, is how reluctant people are to work on record keeping.

It's never made sense to me.

Surely the discipline of management responsible for the systematic creation... has to be responsible for the record KEEPING - surely the moment when a decision is made to record some information is our responsibility.

But I've been disappointed on that front more than once.

Which is a catastrophe.

Because the decision about what to record is the decision about what we make certain that we can remember.

And what we remember becomes the single largest limiting factor on the actions we can take in the future.

And managers spend most of their time thinking about and working on how to make sure that the actions their staff take in the future produce the outcomes they want.

And the decision about what to record and when dictates a huge portion of how successful they can be.

If only they had access to experts who could help them with it - and wanted to.