Records Management - what risk budgets and poker machines have in common.
Two things -
They don't need to pay off very often for people to keep trying them and feel like they work.
The payoff is never quite enough to sustain activity for any length of time.
The two additional challenges for risk budgets -
The moment you actually needed them is right after they would have been useful.
Getting a risk budget and using it well generally means that the organisation loses all perception of the risk.
Not only does it lose its perception of the risk, you've spent money on something that won't happen. Maybe because you spent the money - but you likely have no way of proving that - so you can’t prove that anything you did had any value. The expenditure is value-less.
The thing I've been trying to figure out for the last couple of years, is how to get records management consistently funded.
I'm convinced that risk isn't it.
Risk budgets are a poker machine.
They pay off just frequently enough to convince us we can use them.
They don't produce anything that lasts.
The only evidence they leave,
is an absence of evidence.
We're about evidence.
Not absence.
If we want to be a profession that lasts.
We need to build things that make our organisations work better.
Not just stop it getting worse.