What sort of cycle is your records program in?

We often act like there's one thing that you have to get right in your records program - and once you do that, then it all just works.

The truth, is that the success of any program rests on tens or hundreds of factors - each one adding a little momentum in the direction you want, or shaving a little momentum off.

And if you shave off enough momentum, the program starts to go backwards.

So there's a question we should always be asking - are we adding momentum?

Or is it being shaved off faster than we can add it?

Or even, are we shaving off our own momentum by spending time in the wrong places?

The nice thing about thinking about it as momentum, is that we don't always have to be thinking about the factor that's going to add a ten to the momentum of the program.

Sometimes the ten isn't available - it's a stakeholder who just doesn't want to know us, or it's just too difficult for some other reason.

If we're thinking about a program as the need to add momentum, two fives or ten ones are just as good as the ten is - and are often easier ways to add momentum, particularly if we've been going backwards for a while.

Too often, I think we also discount the value of the one.

Particularly in cultural change situations, trying to change the culture of a hundred people at a time is an impossibility - there's too much cultural momentum working against us.

But getting one or two people to try a different way, that solves a problem, that they'll tell people about - that can often give us our starting momentum that eventually gets us the hundred - if only we're thinking about it like that.

So, how’s your momentum?