Organizational Change
and the Role of the Archivist
Keynote Speech of Chauncey Bell, Senior Vice President, Business Design Associates, Inc., at the Annual Meeting of the Society of California Archivists, Friday, May 1st, 1998, Pasadena, CA.
Laren Metzer heard me speak to the NAGARA Annual Meeting last year, and on the basis of that talk asked that I speak to you today. At that meeting I said that Archivists are on a collision course with computers, and, because you are interpreting your tradition in the language of computers – data and information – the smart money is on the computers winning. I invited the people in attendance to turn their attention to, as Laren put it, "telling stories with the records they manage."
I have spent some 30 years helping organizations change to stay relevant and competitive in their fields. A little over a year ago I began to pay close attention to the field in which you work. One of the things I saw almost immediately is the way that computers are pressing in on your role. You are under attack by one of the great forces in the world today—the computer industry and the tidal waves of new practices all around it. Each of you, I guess, have seen some evidence of this? However, I think the attack is far more serious than you, as a profession, appreciate.
The simple part of the attack comes in this form: the "information industry" claims that it can handle "all the data" more efficiently than you can, and it is gobbling up the lion’s share of the money to do just that. They are right. Many of your roles and functions are going to be altered or replaced by computers and software.
The more dangerous part of the attack, from my point of view, has to do with the impoverished common sense of our time about what it is that is important about what you do. In the race to define the stories that will determine how money and the power to act are going to be allocated to your field, you are competing with the computer industry and the cultural context in which it sits. I said you are competing; even that is misleading. You have been co-opted. You have adopted the stories of the "information clearing" as defining what you are about. This exhibit contrasts the kinds of distinctions and stories from different clearings. Superficially, this can appear to be a matter of semantics. I assure you that it is not. It is a matter of the mind-set of our time, of the tenor of the age, or of the cultural context in which we are living and thinking.
Now, in the end, I don’t believe that your essential role can be replaced by computers, but, before that becomes clear to the world at large, you may already have been replaced by the "Son of Yahoo." The important things that you do are not storing and retrieving information. You contribute value to your communities by listening well to people’s concerns, assuring that adequate records are kept of history-making events and of the acts spoken by history-makers, and doing that in a way that allows you to be effective partners for history-makers as they re-member the past and invent the future. Computers are not capable of doing those things. Santayana did not say those who could not retrieve the data were condemned to produce more of the same data in the future. He said those who could not re-member—i.e., construct an effective interpretation of the past—were condemned to fulfill it, by completing the patterns of that past.
You have been asleep, or largely silent, in the struggle to define the language, the distinctions, and the story line in which you and we interpret the value of what you do. The computer era is insisting that the key distinctions of your role have to do with the capture, storage, transmission, and retrieval of data and information. The story that comes from those distinctions says that the essence of your work is the classifying, tagging, and storing of information for efficient, timely retrieval. For example, take a look at this definition from RMS, the Records Management Society of Great Britain:
"All organizations use information. Information is an asset, a valuable resource, if it is available at the right time, in the right place, at the lowest cost. Records management is the systematic control, organisation, access to and protection of an organisation’s information, whether it be on tape, disk, paper or film, from its creation, through its use, to its permanent retention or legal destruction."
Now the proposition that information is an asset looks absolutely sound, but in fact is the opposite. The great unanswered question of information technology is, what’s the value here? More seriously, this is a job description for a computer program, not for a person. You have joined the great mass of people today who have surrendered to the temptation of thinking of themselves as so-called knowledge workers, thinking of themselves as people who "process information" for a living. It sounds to me that you need the help of competent archivists to help you discern the distinctions with which you will think about what really you are doing, based upon a rich historical interpretation of your role.
Computers do, in fact, offer awesome possibilities for communication, including storage and retrieval. Some of you, listening to this talk, may be tempted to take away that I am an enemy of computers. It is not true. One major part of my work is the design of computer systems to help my clients do their work. I hold several patents on the operation of computer software for coordinating action in digital networks, and in the past I have headed a computer software company. However, if storing and retrieving information continues to be the theme and center of the winning story about your work, then I say to you that you and your discipline are about to be automated.
The histories of professions, disciplines, and technologies are always histories of the ways in which various interpretations and technologies compete with each other for the opportunity to take care of things that matter in our lives. For example, allopathy is the name of the body of medical theory and practice followed today in the general field of medicine in the U.S. Homeopathy and osteopathy are the names of two alternative bodies of theory and practice. At the turn of the last century, I am told that the balance of power among allopathy, homeopathy, and osteopathy, measured in terms of people and money invested, was more or less equal. Since then, the allopaths won, taking almost all the money and prestige for more than two-thirds of a century. But in the last 25 years or so, allopathic practitioners have become arrogant, have stopped offering to visit us at our homes, and today they are under attack, not only from "alternative" traditions such as drugs, acupuncture, and homeopathy, but, more importantly, from the biotechnology industry and from those insurance and governmental agencies that seek to improve the results and reduce the social costs of allopathic practitioners’ behavior. Today, fully ½ of all money spent by individuals on their health care goes to non-allopathic services.
A profession with some similarities to yours is pharmacists. On the one hand, recent surveys still put theirs as one of the most trusted professions in the country. On the other, their profession is evolving largely in the interpretation that the most important thing that they do is put the right pills into the right bottles. The medical insurance industry wants them to have less expensive people put cheaper pills into the bottles. Jerry Seinfeld did a skit about pharmacists recently. He asked, "Why do they have to stand two feet higher than us?" Then, assuming the voice of a pharmacist, he called out, "Get back, I need space here. I’m doing important things. I’m putting these pills into these bottles. If you’ll just be patient, I’ll have your prescription filled in an hour or so." In that interpretation, soon many pharmacists are going to be replaced by ‘put the pills into the bottles’ machines.
I have the interpretation that you have made a terrible mistake in how you, as a community, interpret what it is that you take care of. As a community, you have "bought" the story that your job is fundamentally about the storage and retrieval of things and of information. You have accepted the languages of industrial engineering and information sciences as the language for talking about your field.
Communication and information
Today many people confuse communication and information, as if they were the same things. This confusion has a lot to do with the confusion in your role. "You are hired," or "You are fired" is not information. Each is an invention, brought forth in language, in which a new set of future possibilities appears. Communication and information are different phenomena. Information has to do with what is present and can be asserted. Communication has to do with our successful living together, through the intentional coordination of actions. We human beings bring action, and coordinate that action in language, more specifically in speech acts. We listen to each other’s concerns, and we make requests and offers, promises and assessments, declarations and assertions. In this way we make history together. Not coincidentally, the earliest recorded work of archivists was concerned exclusively with making and maintaining records of exactly these speech acts as they were made by ruling and priestly classes.
It turns out that, when we turn our attention from the collection of symbols that are language, to the way that we do things with language, there are only five major classes of things that we do as we speak with each other.
A careful experiential introduction to this interpretation takes at least a day or two, and we don’t have that time. Nevertheless we note that this is a very curious new set of distinctions, since we have all been doing these things since we were small children, despite the fact that we had poor distinctions for understanding what we were doing. For example, I have a 10 year old daughter. She spent most of her first 6 years working on how to make effective requests. I can report she has achieved a high level of competence. With some people, she gets almost everything she asks for.
The first formal observation of this performative structure in our language, of the structure in which we bring forth and shape action and realities in our worlds, appeared in the 1950’s in the work of a philosopher named John Austin, from Oxford University, in a talk given at Harvard College. It has not yet arrived in the mainstream literature.
If you go to the country’s business schools and ask how action happens in enterprises, you will get many different answers, but none of them will address directly the palpable truth of the matter that we human beings bring forth action in our speaking and listening together. Listening and speaking in ways that support the invention of new futures is creative, and not mechanical work, and it is a stable competence that is going to be enriched, not replaced, by the emerging technologies.
You have been seduced – in your behavior if not in your hearts – to the interpretation that the technologies of your work are at the center of your role. At the same time, you have relegated what you call the "content" of your work to, at best, a status equal to your technologies. I say this to be polite. I believe that in terms of your attention, you give less attention to the nature of the content of your work than to the nature of computer systems you will use to help you with that content.
This structure of speech acts I am now introducing to you can help you bring the "content" of your work back to the center. It is in this structure of action in language that we human beings live together, bring about things that give meaning to life, produce historic events, and "make history."
Let me give you an example of the direct relevance of this interpretation to action in your field, by looking at one of the great historical documents – our Declaration of Independence. In the following exhibit I have put the entire text of the Declaration of Independence. I have also divided and color-coded it into three parts that I will introduce in a moment.
First, however, put in your mind’s eye a young, Hispanic mother, recently naturalized, standing with her child in front of the Declaration in its hermetically sealed case in Washington. She is weeping, filled with awe and gratitude at the new future that she and her child now have, that was brought about by the speaking of a group of people so long ago, and by the commitment of a nation of people over two centuries to keep the commitments of those original speakers alive and vigorous. The existence of the artifact is helpful for keeping that commitment alive, and affords the moment of invention. The money and care with which the artifact has been kept is emblematic of the strength of the commitment of that nation of people to keep alive that original declaration. However, the artifact is only a token of what produced the action, and of the source of the power involved: the speaking, the interpretation, and the commitment of those who have listened to the Declaration over the years.
In the next exhibit, I have divided the Declaration into three key component parts:
When I show this to commercial organizations in the middle of the process of shifting their direction and transforming themselves, one of the things I like to point out is that this extraordinarily powerful event, which we can see through this document, did not consist of an exercise of envisioning a new future, setting objectives, and producing a plan. Those activities can be useful components in an overall scheme of changes, but the place where human action comes from is deeper and simpler than that. We build our future in declarations, assessments, requests, and promises. This is where the content that matters comes from. This is obvious if we are looking with the right distinctions, and invisible if we are not.
Communication, inscriptions, computers, and networks
One of the most important features of today’s computers and networks is that they are transforming the technological space of communication and inscription together. Formerly, I typed a letter, made a copy, filed it, and made a note in my calendar to remind myself to follow up on it. Today, I type and address a message on the computer, and in a few strokes I compose, deliver, and store it, remind myself about it, and hook the record of the letter to the reminder. If I have designed my network well, others who I designate are notified about the communication automatically and have immediate access to what I just said. If they wish (and we design well), they can have my communication appear automatically in their calendar as something about which they will be prompted to take action.
The new medium, constructed of computers, software, and networks, is simultaneously a radical innovation in (1) communication, and (2) in making and managing inscriptions. The effects are already dramatic.
Computers and networks offer a new kind of capacity to speak, listen, read and write, comment, request, purchase, promise, and at the same time to automatically make inscriptions recording any speech act that happens across the network.
The world of records and archives is this same world of inscriptions. We inscribe records of people speaking and acting, and those inscriptions subsequently only make sense in contexts re-membered by acts of appraisal, classification, destination, and management—your acts.
One of your key practices that computers can simulate, but never do, is to listen to the concerns of human beings. Computers can give you tools for hearing better, but they cannot listen for you. Appraisal is the result of a careful, measured listening to the concerns embodied in content, context and structure. This is where your criteria for classification, storage, preservation, and retrieval are developed. Listening for concerns is listening for relations, not information, and concerns are not fixed facts; they shift and adjust, depending upon who is listening, when they listen, and what kind of world they listen in. The worlds we inhabit are ceaselessly changing, and so the work of listening is never complete. Consider the differences of a soccer coach listening to the ambitions and doubts of a star player, and a mother listening to the dreams of her son. Listening is ongoing sensitivity, or attunement, to the world, the historical identities, and the action that constitute and are constituted by it. In the process of listening, you and I co-invent our own future.
One of the problems we have today is that we still have not yet discovered what these things called computers and networks are all about. In the 1850s, before the invention of modern Chemistry and Biology, microscopes were expensive parlor toys through which people looked and marveled at the weird things that appeared in the lens. The microbes that appeared there were, at the time, no more real than are the images in a kaleidoscope today. Our personal use of computers and networks today is not a lot more advanced, no matter how amazing desktop publishing, word processing, electronic mail, and the Internet may be.
Communications and action is what computers are centrally about. Information is a byproduct. Because the marketing has been done in a frenzy of conversation about information, and because the new world has appeared in pieces, we are hard pressed to see the unity of the phenomena. We can help here.
The vast majority of the systems that have transformed the faces of various industries – airlines, banking, warehouse retailing, and others – have a common architecture that is very relevant to our conversation. I can represent its core with the loop that I call A Molecule of Social Action or The Conversation for Action.
This loop maps what I call the "happy path" of successful coordination between two parties who are together bringing a different future. The four arrowheads represent the four acts that are the minimum required for a complete and satisfactory coordination.
Let me give an example. My daughter asks me to take her to lunch – a request that shows at 12 o’clock in the map. After careful consideration (the body of the arrow curving down to the right in the yellow), I make my move: "OK," I say, knowing full well that I am making a promise. I get busy, time passes, and she gets impatient. "Dad, you promised!" she accuses. We walk to the restaurant – perhaps not the chic 5-star restaurant she had in mind (the body of the arrow in the red) and, on arriving and sitting for lunch, I declare, "We’re here!" and ask if she is satisfied (the arrowhead at 6pm). Her smile and kiss I take as her Declaration of Satisfaction (the arrowhead at 9pm).
The structure is exactly the same for asking for a reservation on a plane flying to Boston, interacting with an ATM machine requesting cash, and whenever two people interact to produce a different future than the one already coming to them. The loop shows us the structure in which we bring action in the world.
This moment in history is not like the moment of the typewriter. We are not experiencing a technological state-change. The typewriter changed our interpretation of how it makes sense to form inscriptions. The new technologies do much more than eliminate or re-allocate much of the work we know. They change the space in which we make relationships with each other, and bring new possibilities for action. We are in the midst of a change in our way of being. We are the kinds of animals who become what we are through the interpretations we build of ourselves– that’s the secret center of your profession – and in computers and networks we have invented a new medium through which we will interpret ourselves. This moment is like the moment in which we changed from seeing ourselves as planters of seeds and managers of animals to the moment in which we began to see ourselves as controllers of machinery and tools.
What will be your role in the midst of all this change?
What is going to happen to your field, to its people and practices in the midst of these changes? What is going to happen to you?
(In the paper I did for NAGARA I walked through a history of Desktop Publishing as an analogy with which to think. I recommend you look there as well.)
What roles will be available to archivists and records administrators? As you have seen happening in other disciplines and professions, some of your roles are going to change or even disappear, and the lines may blur between your roles and the roles of librarians, historians, and even information professionals and computer programmers. We cannot know exactly what your jobs will be like in ten years, but one thing is certain: your job is not to be a more sophisticated computer, but to assist in co-inventing the new world we are already entering. Most of today’s managers and most of the current body of management practices and theory are at a loss to cope with multiple emerging worlds of relationships and action. They need your help.
We know a different future is inevitable; the central job of leaders is to invent the narratives and emotional structures that give shape to that future and allow the rest of us participate in it. The current conventional wisdom suggests that the way to prepare the future is to imagine and build scenarios of possible tomorrows: visions, missions, objectives and the like. I submit to you that once again, Santayana was right: the prudent path to the future begins, instead, in retentiveness, in a careful interpretation of the past.
Let me give you another example. In some parts of the world it is still possible to observe the old style of retail transactions in stores where one person shows the product, a second writes up the order, and a third takes the money. That style is very old, and its roots have to do with mistrust of people handling money and inscriptions. Handling the product, making the record, and handling the money are separated, so that it is more difficult for theft or other mismanagement of product or money to occur. Today, when we are buying a product, especially with a credit card, that old style looks anachronistic.
But go into almost any of your offices, and you will encounter work structures essentially unchanged since medieval treasury officials invented them: waiting in lines and queues, threading through phone-mazes to find responsible people, different paths for filling in different forms, and yet another line for paying fees. We haven’t yet grasped how anachronistic are these essentially feudal structures of organizing work, invented in part to make the grandest county sheriff tremble in his boots. We still organize many of our great organizations, including government departments, universities, and libraries, in similar styles.
The new generation of technologies will accelerate the rate at which these old styles are undermined, challenged, and transformed. With computer networks now encircling the globe, we have the possibility of an inscription that can receive instructions, consult its own clock and other references, and, at a time instructed, speak to us in a way it has been instructed to speak.
In government institutions and businesses, software tools interacting with metering and signaling devices will observe changes in accounts and records, report important changes, out-of-balance and out-of-standard situations, signal the onset of pending events, and initiate action in the organization.
It may look to some that I am saying that the traditional mechanics and activities of your field are no longer important. I want to emphasize: that is not my message. Rather, those are the parts of your work where computers and networks are going to be, literally, orders of magnitude less expensive and more effective than people moving data around by hand. Also, the computers make fewer complaints. Important parts of your traditional work will be taken over by this sort of tool, and will disappear into the networks. Which parts will be taken over? Those parts in which the work really can be reliably described by algorithms; the parts that are truly comprised of mechanistic repetition of activities that do not require human listening, judgment, or commitment for their successful completion.
To produce the best future for yourselves you therefore will need exceptional faculties for manipulating inscriptions and records and for collaborating with others to make history. For the former area, a tremendous number of people are available and eager to help you develop those faculties. For the latter area, I suggest you apply your own discipline to the question, and that you seek new help.
At the same time, listening has always been at the core of all your practices, albeit invisible to all but the most tenacious of observers. When many of the more visible aspects of your practices have disappeared into networks, listening will remain. In remembering this (and other aspects as well), you re-member yourselves for the future that is coming. And more than only yourselves; by being archivists and records managers, and thinking about your work in this way, you will help to remind the rest of us of the centrality of listening to concerns in all of our work.
To be provocative, let me make the point this way. To whose concerns will you listen most attentively: those of the CEO, the CFO, the shareholder, the customer, or a hodge-podge? The answer makes a difference in the commerce you and I will experience. Will you listen to the concerns and distinctions of judges, legislators, journalists, or voters? The answer makes a difference to the state we will live in tomorrow.
It is time for you to invent and tell a new story about yourselves, a story you can "sing around the fires" at night that tells of your past accomplishments and the future you are bringing. To be seductive, your story must show how you take care of things that matter to people. It must be a story in which you and your clients, together, can thrive; a story that builds your identity for the future.
You need to apply the best traditions of your work to preparing this new interpretation, or else you are likely to end up where you are headed, and many or most of you will find yourselves replaced by computers. The computers will do certain important mechanical parts of your jobs with more speed and reliability (and fewer complaints) than you are able to do them now. However, the real center of your work could be damaged or lost for some period of time, and that would be a tragedy for all of us.
I can say a few more things about the story you must invent:
People who are in tune with the age in which they live and act do not resist or hold back change; they invite it, in the right moment, and shape how it appears. We call that making history.
In the end, we are observing the emergence of a new, global way of being. That is one more reason why I ask you come to your senses and take responsibility as a community for directing the invention of a rich new, enlarged interpretation of the role of your venerable profession: we need your help.
The full text of a long paper on the future of archiving as a profession "Re-membering the future", that I wrote for NAGARA is available on Rick Barry’s website. It contains a reading list for those of you who are interested in pursuing further what I have raised in this talk.