Short and long term program strategy in records

This is an idea that I think is worth stealing from economics.

In economics, there’s a simple idea in considering economic problems over either a short or long term time horizon.

What makes it interesting is that short and long term aren’t defined in any kind of temporal measure, they’re defined in terms of the relative constraints experienced.

In the short term, certain things are fixed and unchangeable - so as much as you’d be able to do better if you could change them, the time frame doesn’t allow you to - it’s just too short. This might mean that short term for you means within the current budget cycle - during which your budget is fixed, or it could mean writhing the lifespan of your current executive if they’re not the listening types.

Over the long term, nothing is fixed - everything can be changed, it’s really just about the direction you want to go in, and what you have to do to get there.

There are a bunch of reasons that this is a useful concept when setting strategy.

The first is that if you don’t recognise the existence of the short and long term, you’re going to try and change things in a period of time that your organisation won’t accept. A simplistic example is that if you prefer a value based program, but your organisation has been operating under a compliance program, you can’t come in and say that “tomorrow, we’re going to switch to an exclusively value based program” - because over the short term, there’s too much stuff already operating for the change to happen.

The second and obviously related reason, is that your short term sets up your long term by creating the start of a narrative that your organisation can accept. The (again) simplistic example is that if you want to switch to a value based program, but your organisation only knows records as a compliance based thing, your short term should include a plan to set that long term change up. It could be a set of trivially small projects that help people see records differently, it could be an executive communication plan showing case studies of records as a value centre in other organisations. The point is that the short term narrative sets up the change in the long term narrative - and only over the long term can you change the fundamental aspects of your program.

What does this type of short and long term mean for you in your organisation, developing your strategy?