What senior people actually need to understand about records
How do you treat things when you don’t understand them?
We (the human race) don’t have a great record with this kind of thing.
When we don’t understand something, we generally treat it with fear, suspicion and derision - or at least mild contempt.
We also tend to want to avoid it as a topic - and preference spending it on things that we understand - like those generally friendly people from IT who helped us fix our phone, and gave us that new application when we couldn’t figure out how the records system worked.
So if you’ve had records treated with mild contempt in your organisation, and can’t stand how well IT is treated, it might just be that you’ve got an organisation that doesn’t understand it for whom it’s not legible and comprehensible.
The flip side of this is how it feels to be competent at something complicated - like records management.
We love explaining records to people because it helps us feel competent, and in that competence is an elevation of sorts - we’re an expert, we have expertise, we’re valuable because we know something that the other person doesn’t.
Here we are, demonstrating all this knowledge that we have by explaining it at length.
The feeling that we’ve forgotten is how overwhelmed we felt the first time we tried to understand all of records and started to get a sense of how big and complicated it all is.
This is actually the root of the understanding problem.
Einstein was familiar with this - you’d all have heard the quote about explaining things at a 9 year old level?
But to explain isn’t enough.
What gets explained is the most important thing.
People don’t need a 9 year old explanation of the whole of records practice.
For records to be legible, and comprehensible, I think they need to understand three things -
That it’s aiming at something that they care about, value and understand.
How it’s going to get to that thing (what is the work that needs doing).
That there’s regular progress.
Get people comfortable with those three things and records will stop seeming strange, and uncomfortable.