Social defenses and colluding on the fiction of archival compliance in records management

This isn't a fully formed set of ideas - but sometimes I have to write about important things to know what I think. I'd love to know what you think. This means that it rambles a bit, and contains a set of points I haven't fully thought through - I hope you'll comment and help me see the things I'm not seeing. This should be a discussion starter.

I've been musing lately on how many organisations I've worked with over the last 5 years have policy that says "xyz is the agency official recordkeeping system.”

Then they have a business system or set of business systems.

90% of the work of the organisation gets done in the business system.

Which is (officially) NOT a records system - look, there's a policy and everything that says so.

At the moment, I'm doing a masters in organisational dynamics.

What we call this, is a social defense.

Social defenses are situations in which we consciously or unconsciously collude with people so that we don't have to deal directly with something. Unconsciously is important - sometimes, we don't even realise we're doing it. We might just know that we did something once, and it went badly - so we're not going to do it again, even if it's the right thing.

They cause all kinds of weird work and communication patterns, and lead to the long term perpetuation of strange behavior as they become part of the working culture of the organisation, industry and professional group.

A great example are lots of family problems. Think about the things that you'd like to ask your relatives about at family barbecues, but you know that if you do, there's going to be an argument - so the entire family collude on not discussing that issue.

At work, you've probably also experienced a time when the common sense solution to a problem was to do x, but if you bring up x with your boss, you're going to get yelled at, so everyone just does y - because y is acceptable to everyone, even if it doesn't actually fix the problem.

You can see it in office movement patterns as well. Every office has someone who is just unpleasant - and people tend to avoid them. If you mapped the patterns of movement around the office, you'd see that wherever that person went, movement patterns changed so that people avoided them.

To me, official recordkeeping systems are one of these great incidences of social collusion.

By having an official recordkeeping system, the organisation gets to both comply with archival regulations - "look mr/mrs archival regulator, here's our compliant recordkeeping system, and our official policy that says it's the official one signed by all the official persons."

And then they get to go off and buy whatever business systems they want - because at scale, you actually just can't get work done without them.

There is an epic amount of social defense going on here - which is collusive in nature, because people on both sides have to agree (often implicitly and unconsciously) not to talk about an issue because it would create conflict.

Archival regulators get to largely ignore business systems - "look, they've got an official records system, and it complies and everything!"

IT and business stakeholders get to truck on and buy whatever business systems they please, treating compliance with archival regulation (ie. actual laws and legislative power) as optional - if they consider it at all.

Industry analysts come up with convenient names - Gartner for example have "systems of record" and "systems of engagement" - don't tell me that there aren't a lot of CIOs going around telling themselves that "this is just a system of engagement."

This problem of collusion on archival compliance has really serious consequences for records.

The problem with social defenses like this, is that very soon, the patterns of behavior that it produces are not rational - but they get rationalised. If you want more on the neuro science of this, google "split brain experiments"

How does someone invest in something that's not rational?

If it's causing them a problem, generally what they do is that they create a project to deal with the problem - somewhere else - and then gradually withdraw the funding from the area they don't understand until it doesn't have enough money to cause problems anymore.

In records (for me), this kind of thing is most visible with business systems.

The idea that they're not records systems, is just plain stupid.

People are recording information in them all day - and if you're a public servant, that's practically the definition of a record.

What we've done, is spend 50 years ignoring databases by defining records as other things. When it became obvious that databases were full of records, we invented the fiction of an official records system and then adopted compliance standards that they can't meet - all the while watching public servants and others in our organisations recording information in them with an intensity that we could only dream of for our "#official" records system.

A lot of our design practices are also areas of massive collusion - but mostly it's us in the profession colluding with ourselves. A pattern that started (as far as I can tell) when records systems started to have "users," and we needed to believe that professionals did a better job of keeping records.

Design practices evolve to solve problems and produce results.

In other professions, when something gets designed and it doesn't work, they go back to the drawing board and redesign it.

In records management, when we design something that doesn't work, we go back to the policy that says "official records system" and other professionals to reinforce that we've done it the right way, the "#compliant" way - anything other than deal with the fact that what we've designed isn't working.

We also collude with frontline users and management every time we say "that's not a records system, once you've completed that business process, you have to move it to the records system" - to which they say "yes, we'll do it" - the wink wink, nudge nudge bit of that sentence is

Social defences do have an important function.

They produce organisations in which we can maintain our employment, and have relationships with people that are not filled with conflict.

Ultimately though, the patterns they are creating are damaging to the records profession, because they produce work practices that go against common sense, and even uncommon sense when measured in efficiency terms (and efficient is in the first line of the ISO records management definition).

There are historical analogs.

Blockbuster closed its last store about a year ago.

What happened to blockbuster is happening to us.

They saw themselves as providing places where people could come and get first videos, then DVDs.

What people wanted was convenient movies.

We think that we're here to provide compliant records services.

What people want is the right information to do their job with the smallest amount of friction possible - and they're getting it because they are actively colluding with us on ways to marginalise our practices so that conflict isn't created.

I'm starting to see most of the things that stop us delivering on that as social defenses in which we collude with people so that we don't have to have a fight about our practices, and then deal with the hardest thing of all - the realisation that our practices aren't producing good results, and we might have to change.