The official yes/unofficial no, and how to beat it in your records program.

I worked in an organisation once that used to say "yes" a lot when I said "we should do" a thing.

What kept happening though, was that after I'd done considerable work, i'd arrive at a point where i'd need the rest of the organisation to contribute time and effort - and it wouldn't appear.

People would suddenly be fully committed to other projects or on secondment, funding would have been mysteriously used for "unexpected high priority projects" and other resources just wouldn't be available anymore.

I made the mistake of doing this many times - and putting in a huge amount of work, only to have the projects fail towards the end because I couldn't get the rest of the organisation to turn up when I needed them to.

Even though all the people with the required authority had said "yes."

The lesson I took from it is one that's core to what's happening to records in many organisations.

In many organisations, the organisation gives an official "yes" - because there's regulation and legislation - particularly archival regulation and legislation.

When the organisation is asked to support this regulation and legislation, an "official no" just isn't an option - it’s tantamount to saying "we're going to break the law" or "we're not going to fully support the implementation of that legislation and regulation"- which is totally unacceptable from a political standpoint.

What I have found is acceptable though, is an "unofficial no" - the unofficial no is where no one ever actually says no, but right around the time you need their support - you need them to fund the thing they said they'd fund, need them to take enforcement action etc. etc. they are “no longer able to” - for a laundry list of reasons - or they’re just not returning your call/email/text message/teams message/carrier pigeon.

And you know the old saying.

Fool me once - shame on you.

Fool me twice - shame on me.

If you're in this situation, it just means that you can't trust your organisation to do what they say - and you need to read between the lines if you want to deliver a successful (not to mention fulfilling and satisfying) program.

It's important to remember that this situation is probably not their fault - they're probably in just as much of a bind as you are, they'd probably just prefer to say "official no" - but can't because of the politics of their own role.

The solution - or at least the one that worked for me - was to make sure that any time I pitched a project, the effort and resource commitment from other business units and senior management came early on.

That way, the failures happened early and with a minimal expenditure of my time and effort.

While it wasn't ideal, it was far better than the situation of repeated failure after large expenditures of time that I kept finding myself in.

What was really important though, was how I started to use the failures.

In the end, project proposals became experiments designed to find out what the organisation actually wanted.

The things that they said yes to - and then wouldn't turn up for, were the things I stopped trying to do (no matter how much I wanted to).

The things that they said yes to - and then turned up to support, were the things that I did more of - no matter how boring or comparatively ineffective I thought they were.

Ultimately I left that organisation unsatisfied and unfulfilled - we could have achieved so much if only we could have had a straight conversation.

But I spent the second half of my time there far less frustrated than the first half of my time there because I learned to listen to the organisation say yes or no in the only ways that were acceptable for it to do so.

I think that there’s a lesson in this that many records programs in many organisations could learn from.