Telling vs persuading in records

Persuade means to cause someone to believe something.

Tell means to communicate information to someone in spoken or written words.

The difference between them is the difference between whether someone does what you ask of them - or doesn't.

If you've got an organisation full of people and you've told them all the things that they're going to get if they just do what you ask, and they're not doing it - you haven't persuaded them.

The hard, anxiety generating work is in understanding the reason people are not persuaded.

It can only really be one of two reasons -

1. We're just not telling them the right way.

2. What we believe (and are telling them) is erroneous.

Too often I see things in records that are just illogical - and yet we treat them like they were written in a sacred book by a messianic figure and are unquestionable.

We tell people that life will get easier for them if they just stop putting their documents in the case management system that manages their entire workflow and start putting them in our records system - ie. double the number of systems and organising logics that they have to interact with every time they do any work.

Or life will get easier for them if they just organise their information functionally - when their entire workflow and way of thinking about their work is subject based.

Or we tell them that a new system is easy to use - without considering that "easy" is a relative term - and that they probably don't think it's easy to enter a metadata popup 90 times a day when the other system option doesn't require them to do it.

The difference between telling and persuading is the difference between a successful program and an unsuccessful one.

If we are going to be honest though, we need to know that our claims are true because it is very easy to believe something that is untrue, and to be very persuasive about it.

The problem is that persuasion generally only gets people to try something the first time.

It doesn't get them to keep doing it.

And it's the "keep doing it" that's the problem for most of us.