Why ordinary people create records

Records are just representations of things that happened in the real world. They're not the thing, they're an artefact of the thing.

The thing about this type of artefact, is that we're creating them all day long.

If we have a lot of stuff to do, we create records so that we can remember the relevent details when we need to know them.

Or we create them so that we can manage large volumes of tasks, or things, or people.

Much of managing and reporting for a team is a process that involves creating records so that we know the status of work without having to ask someone, and so that we know it beyond our capacity to remember.

We don't create these records looking backwards, we keep them looking forwards.

At some point, we get to keeping things because they may need to refer to it later.

This is true of the best recordkeeping profession in the world - accounting.

When Luca Pacioli wrote the book on the Venetian Method (that we now know as double entry accounting), he wasn't doing it so that he could help people understand where they'd been, he was doing it to answer two questions -

1. Where am I now financially?

2. What can I do now that I know my financial position?

The act of creating those records was all about looking forward.

To me, this is a huge opportunity in records management.

Too often we go to people and say to them "you have to keep this just in case" or "you have to keep this because legislation."

If we went to them and said "here, let me help you organise your work so that you know where you are, and you know what's left to do," we'd get a lot of people saying yes just because it's a huge challenge.

They'd also keep those records religiously, because people and teams waste a huge amount of time on working out where they are, and where they need to get to, and suffer significantly from anxiety because of it.

What's beautiful about this idea, is that we would get high quality records out the end of the process purely because they were helpful.

And if they found us helpful, they'd probably ask us for help again next time - and we'd start a virtuous cycle where we got what we needed because we helped.

And I would bet significant amounts of money that helping people is a more effective way to achieve our goals than any compliance standard we currently have.