What records are for - and climate change.

Records are for remembering with consistency.

We keep them so that when we forget, we can refresh our memory and the way we refresh it is consistent with what we originally remembered first-hand.

Remembering with consistency is the foundation of coordinated action at any meaningful scale.

Which is ultimately about trust.

People won't act in a coordinated manner, unless they feel like they can count on other people to act the same way.

The simple question we have to ask, is why are we trying to remember things?

Why is it important to remember?

The simplest reason is so that we know what to do in the future, and can do it properly.

I'm sure that you've all had a time when you've reached the supermarket and forgotten to buy something.

You found out by getting home and realising that you didn't buy something that you needed for another future action.

If only you'd had a record of the things you were planning to buy when you reached the supermarket!

This is the simplest thing that records are for.

This is a small improvement - but an important one. Many of the things that we take for granted about our lives are greatly improved with records.

There are also lots of circumstances in which things become very difficult or impossible without records.

Almost every instance in which we have to take coordinated action in a group of people (so basically the entire modern world) only works because we have records.

Any time we have to make more than one interdependent decision only works because we have records.

Imagine if we had no ability to record anything.

Life would be chaos.

Almost anything we tried to do that required any meaningful amount of time between thought and action, or that required any group of people to act together with purpose, would become impossible.

Imagine trying to build a power station without records.

Imagine trying to then operate the power station.

The power company would have to remember how much electricity each person used.

And bill them - by getting a person to talk to another person about how much they owed.

You'd have to call your bank to pay them.

Someone at your bank would have to remember how much money you had in your account.

Then you'd have to remember that you'd done it.

And rely on the power company to remember that they'd recieved your payment and the bank to debit it from your memorised account - and also rely on both parties not commit fraud.

The basic elements of trust would likely not last very long at all.

Society itself would totally break down.

So we have records.

You have a contract with your power company.

They create records of what you owe them and send them to you - a bill.

You make a payment - and your bank automatically keeps a record that you have.

If you need to coordinate activity with people to get something done, you create a record of it so that when someone inevitably forgets - they can refresh their memory, and you can all depend on each other to be working consistently on the right thing.

The alternative, is the economy of some era well before any of our messianic figures were born.

No cities.

No medicine.

No plumbing - indoor or outdoor.

Nothing that requires more than a few people to take inter-dependent action.

This is what records are for.

None of this is for a long time off in the future.

It's for right now, and tomorrow.

Records management as it is taught, is a dying discipline - yet there have never been more records in use in the history of the world.

And never so many large scale problems requiring large groups to work together.

Take climate change for instance.

It is the largest problem in human history.

It will be solved by the largest coordinated action in human history.

And most of our profession are arguing about how we get our records into the right bucket.

The stupidity of this argument, is that we're arguing about it after the work that made the records necessary has already been done.

The work most of us do isn't actually records work.

It's meta-records.

Or post-records.

The essential work of records is in using the skills the profession has, to help people organise themselves.

So that they can do more coordinated action, in a more coordinate manner.

So they can organise larger and larger groups doing more and more important work.

Maybe even solve climate change.

Or we can just go and hit people with a stick.

To put the record in the bucket.

One

At

a

time.

People need help organising the work.

And organising groups of people.

To get larger and larger things done.

This is the important work of records.

It's what records are for.

It's up to us.

Do we want to be part of solving the largest problems in human history?

Or do we want to let the amateurs fumble around with it until they learn what we already know?