Teams chats, record keeping, infantilisation and slippery slopes

Before I start this, record keeping the way I'm talking about it means deciding what knowledge to record in a permanent tangible way (except for the start, which should be obvious).

Once upon a time, record keeping was hard.

Go back past the middle ages, and it was an oral thing.

People had to commit to remembering specific things - which meant that our ability to keep records was above zero, but not far above zero.

So we did very little of it.

Then we learned to write things down.

And the bandwidth was still quite low - but it was higher, and we could (for the first time) exchange our records without having to send a person somewhere.

What does this have to do with teams chats?

We are now at the point where we can record anything except our thoughts - at least until the cost of FMRIs comes down and the resolution goes up considerably.

The question is whether we should be recording them.

I think that teams chats are symbolic of this.

To me, they symbolise how poor the discourse around recordkeeping has become in our organisations.

At some point, we thought it would be a good idea to stop talking about records, and just focus on getting everyone to put their records in a system so we could manage them.

For me, this attacked the heart of records - which is the decision about what to record.

And because we've failed to bring that into the discourse about administrative power in our organisations, we're having to deal with the way staff use teams chats like they're small children who can't be trusted instead of adults who need to account for their use of administrative power.

There are two poles here (and probably others, for the sake of provoking discussion, lets agree on two).

The first is that we just record everything all the time - which ends with us making staff record every conversation about every trivial and irrelevent thing just in case they have a conversation about something administrative (there's a book about this - clue - it's by George Orwell)

OR

We bring back a discourse about record keeping as something that is about accounting for the use of the administrative power in organisations.