What people are really asking when they ask about the definition of ‘record’

A little while ago, I was interviewed by a university trying to get the voice of the industry into their data management course. One of the questions stuck with me - they asked me about the tools or technologies that I find indispensable in my work, and the answer came to me immediately. The surprise was, it wasn’t really a tool of records management - it’s five why’s.

“Five why’s” is a questioning technique - and Wikipedia does a great job of explaining it, so I won’t do a lot here, other than to say it reflects an idea that when people bring you a problem (and do they bring us anything else?), what they’re bringing you is a symptom, if you solve the symptom, you’re not actually solving the problem. Asking ‘why’ five times gets to the actual problem itself. In my experience, sometimes it’s three why’s, sometimes it’s seven - but it’s always more than one. When I make mistakes giving advice (a recent example springs to mine), it’s because I didn’t ask why enough times before I started trying to tell people the answer.

To me, the biggest opportunity for this technique, is when people ask us to define record for them.

My experience of this question, is they are really asking us “how will the actions you are asking for produce value for our organisation”, that’s the future oriented question - it could also be “how are the actions we are already taking producing value for our organisation”.

The reason they ask us, is because we’re asking them to spend money on ‘implementing’, ‘improving’ or sustaining records management - which means imposing our practices on the management of records in the organisation.

They want to know what value we’re going to get from the exercise.

They keep asking about definitions, because the bill is a big one, and we haven’t met their expectations about how they are normally asked to spend money.

Anyone who can spend money in an organisation is used to being asked to spend it in a certain way, not because they want to be difficult, but because financial governance frameworks mean they can’t spend money unless they can tell a particular story about why they’re spending it - which means that either the person asking them to spend the money has to bring them the ready-made story, or they have to elicit the details required to justify it for themselves. Skilled managers understand this, and know that if they don’t present the right story, the story that gets presented is unlikely to be the one that they hoped would be presented.

The story they’re used to getting says “here is a problem”, it is followed by, “here is how much the problem is costing us now”, which is closely followed by “here is how we will solve it” - which is a story unto itself - that then gets capped off by the two most important elements - “here is how much it will cost, and here is how we will manage delivery risk”. This is how skilled managers present it - they also generally do the very trivial work of calculating the costs of the problem vs the costs of the solution, and deliver it as an ROI figure.

When records management becomes a skilled management discipline, people will stop asking us about definitions.

People are only confused about the definition of a record because they get asked for millions of dollars to solve undefined and unquantified problems, in ways that don’t make sense to them, with no quantified return on investment. They are told a story, but the story is based on beliefs that they don’t share, and without the numbers to support the belief they are being presented with, they can’t buy the story - either emotionally, or intellectually.

They are also faced with the huge consequence, that if they spend money without being able to justify it in terms of a return on investment, comfortable that it won’t fail at the delivery, the consequences for them are likely to be significant, and lasting - their competence as managers will be questioned, and that will have an impact on their job and likely career prospects.

In my experience, they keep asking for definitions because they’re expecting a certain presentation from us, and they’re not getting it. They know that everyone else who asks them for money knows how to ask, and they assume that we do too. They assume that because of this, the person not understanding the presentation is them - so they ask questions, hoping it will start to make sense.

When we’ve presented our case to them with rock solid certainty, as though the value is self evident, and they’ve still not gotten it, they do whatever everyone does when they think it’s them that’s not understanding something that everyone else gets. They say “great presentation”, then they make vague statements about assessing financial priorities - and put our proposal at the bottom of the pile, because that’s what everyone does with things they don’t understand - they avoid them. You can tell if this is your proposal because it either doesn’t get funded, or it gets funded towards the end of the year - out of the budget that is left.

The key to having the conversation about defining ‘record’ is to recognise this, and to understand it as the opportunity it presents - which is the opportunity to understand how someone might invest in records management, if they were presented with the right story about it. If there is existing expenditure, the opportunity is virtually the same - it’s an opportunity to understand how the stakeholder needs to be presented with the value of records managementIt’s not an opportunity to tell. It’s an opportunity to ask - it’s an opportunity for five whys, and a conversation about problems that the stakeholder values, and that we might solve. The outcome isn’t a definition, the outcome is shared understanding, and the ability to tell a story that helps us understand what we need to do if we are to fulfil the expectation about how someone invests in records.