Records management - better rubrics for practice effectiveness to drive change

I've been musing on disposal processes lately, and how we create the confidence in our organisations so that they will say yes.

We have a massive and systemic practice failure.

You can tell, because our main focus is the lifecycle, and we fail to get our records to the end of it almost 100% of the time.

What actually stops disposal from happening?

Confidence.

No one is confident enough in the process that got the record to the end of it's lifecycle, to say yes to actually ending it.

The error rate is too high.

They know that.

We know that.

We want to read every record before we send it to them.

They want to read every record before they destroy it.

No one, is going to destroy anything when the system we have created creates error rates that require that big an investment of time to get to the end.

This is a systemic, and systematic failure.

It is the result of dogma winning over pragmatism.

We have all of these things that we 'must' do - because there's no other way, it's the best, an archive told us to, schellenberg et. al. said it was great etc. etc.

It keeps failing.

We fail when we use it.

While we keep failing.

(drum roll)

We’ll keep failing.

What we need, is better ways to measure what we are doing.

We need to measure it in terms of the errors it produces that stop us getting where we want to go.

It’s really one very important question - how many errors do we have to have, before people lose confidence, and won’t move to the next stage of the process?

Six sigma is an idea from manufacturing that provides a set of tools and techniques for reducing errors in manufacturing proceses.

The six sigma label itself refers to error rate - a six sigma error rate is about 4 errors per million.

To me, the thing we have to do is start taking this lens to our practices.

If we thought about every single practice we engaged in from the point of view of the errors it created next to alternatives,

and we constantly thought about how we could drive down that error rate,

we would be able to start evolving our practices in the direction of being effective, rather than 'best practice' (because best practice keeps failing).

At the moment, best practice delivers a process that doesn't reach an end point.

And that problem isn't getting better, it's getting worse.

The first thing we need to do, is decide what is important.

If we're a profession that believes our outcomes are important,

the practices we use to get to the outcome should be largely irrelevent.

Because the outcome is the most important.

At the moment, our processes are failing - systemically.

It's not an organisational factor - because it's almost every organisation.

It's not a practitioner factor - because it's almost every practitioner.

It's a systemic failure.

The only way we turn it around, is to agree that the outcomes are more important than the process - because it’s only then that changing the process becomes possible.

If we keep telling ourselves that the practices are more important than the outcomes, the only thing we'll eventually deliver is the end of a profession.

So where to start?

Begin at the beginning.

If capturing a record is the first failure point, how many errors is our practice producing per million records?

How can we halve the error rate?

How can we halve it again?

And again?

And again?

Again?

?