Episode Transcript
[00:00:01] Speaker A: Hello. Thank you for joining us. Welcome to what Counts, the podcast where we dive deep into the world of information governance. Here we highlight proven solutions developed through our experience working with companies across various industries, and we talk about how you can apply these solutions to your company.
Whether you're interested in information governance, have a need, or just curious about information management challenges like email management, retention management, or asset data management, this podcast is for you.
This is Lee, and in this episode, Moore and I will talk about why so many organizations believe they're operating in an orderly, well documented, well managed environment when the reality is often very different.
Maura I want to start with something we see all the time. A leadership team tells us, oh, we're pretty mature. We have processes, we have documentation, we're in good shape. And then we start to peel back the layers.
[00:01:04] Speaker B: Okay, well, it's a real paradox because there's a sort of a truism in the world of audits that says if it's not documented, it didn't happen.
And I for years have been looking for the place where I read that it was in some GAO report, but it's still true, regardless of whether I can find the source.
And because when you go in to do an audit, whether it's a financial audit or a process audit or something like a, you know, an ISO, an ISO certification audit or something like that, all of them have in common that the auditors will come in and first they will ask for your written down processes and procedures, and then they will observe what the team does and whether or not it follows that written process or procedure. And at the end of it, the way you demonstrate that you followed it, because they're not actually observing on a daily basis, what did you do today? They'll do things like, okay, you have 27 different Sox procedural requirements around how you set up a new vendor in your financial system and how you set up a new contract and how you approve it for payment.
And so they'll get that process and they'll say, okay, we should have evidence. You should be able to give us evidence that you followed these steps.
And then what we've seen is that the contract management team or the vendor management team or the accounts payable team is just running around grabbing stuff to say, look, here, here, here, here, here, here's this, here's the approval of the new vendors, or here's the way we approve, here's how we went through, and here's the approval for this contract to get signed.
Is it true that they're following the processes or Is it true that they're producing artifacts that are a result of following a process, but not necessarily the written process? And it's very hard to tell what.
[00:03:13] Speaker A: The organization thinks it's doing, what the organization wants to believe it's doing.
Right.
[00:03:21] Speaker B: And how it's actually working.
And it is such a, like I said, it's a paradox because you want the documentation. That's how you prove things happened. Here is the evidence.
But there's gaps in the documentation. There have to be gaps, because how does the document get from Leigh to Mora? Is it an email?
Is it a handwritten note?
As we've certainly had clients who talked about that, I would write this down. I would be on the phone, I would write this down and then I would, sorry. And then I'll hand it to Joe, who sits in the next room. And then Joe goes into the system and he does something, or worse, Joe gives it to Mary and Mary puts it in a spreadsheet.
And so you have all these steps that happen. And at the end of the day, the evidence that gets handed over is here's an approval that says it's probably an approval email that says, go ahead and make this purchase.
Right?
[00:04:32] Speaker A: Yep.
[00:04:34] Speaker B: Find can be a scavenger hunt. And this is where, this is where I blame the big search engines and the Google method of searching, because you can.
Everyone has this illusion of being able to just do a keyword search and find what they need.
And that's not accurate.
[00:05:01] Speaker A: That was a big bone of contention at one client some time ago where they said, no, we're not going to categorize everything. We're not going to put it in folders, we're not going to create a file plan. We're just going to search. That's it. As long as we put the parameters around the search, everything, everybody will be fine.
[00:05:19] Speaker B: It's not true. I mean, they're. I would say, instead of fine, what they are is lucky.
They're lucky if they find what they're looking for.
They're lucky if they happen to find a wrong version, that they figure it out early enough.
And they're lucky that there's not bet the company litigation going on or some major safety violation that results in, you know, real world consequences at the worst or major fines and sanctions at the least.
So the everything is fine myth only works as long as you're lucky.
[00:05:58] Speaker A: So I'm going to go a little off script here, and we've had numerous episodes about workarounds, but that's my question, right? That the Process is X, people do Y.
And then there's the workarounds that people do to get things done. Why is it so hard to recognize that this is a workaround and that the process does need to change?
[00:06:22] Speaker B: That is a great question.
I have some theories. So in no particular order, I'm going to throw them out. You tell me what you think.
I think the first problem is that the people who set the goals are pretty far removed from the people who do the work.
And so the goal is from the time I tell you I need a new contract set up to the time it gets set up, that timeframe is going to be driven by my perception of how anxious the counterparty is and therefore how quickly I need to get this deal done.
And not based on how long you tell me it will take to do the work the right way.
You, the worker tell me it will take to do the work the right way. I think that's a big disconnect in a lot of places. Actually. I just found out that one of our recent contracts suffered from that type of challenge and, and which explains why we got a random follow up email two months after we started saying please resubmit all your insurance documentation because there were some shortcuts taken that we didn't know about and that we weren't asking for, but internally they were asking for it. So I think that's a big reason. What do you think about that, that disconnect between goal setting and reality of what it takes to get something done?
[00:07:56] Speaker A: Absolutely. And I don't, I don't want to steal one of your items, but I think that could be first. But I think this is the way we always done it is one of the mentality that gets you stuck in. Yeah, this is the workaround, this is what we do. This is how it's always been done.
[00:08:14] Speaker B: I think that that is absolutely a second, a second reason that this happens. And I want to add to that.
This is how it's always been done and I'm afraid to change it because I have this unreasonable expectation on the goal and I can't change that because that's a non starter. The person who set that goal is not going to hear me.
So I'm afraid to make any changes because I know I can get this done even if it means I have to work three days in a row until 10 o' clock at night and I'm afraid to change it and mess it up somehow.
So this is the way it's always done combined with a little bit of fear.
Real Even more than just people don't like change. I think there's real fear of, and it varies culture to culture how real the fear is of repercussions. But even when there's not a repercussion coming, like getting in trouble, I think most people feel, feel a sense of purpose. They want to do their job well.
And, and so the expectation is I'll do whatever I can to get this done.
And that's following the way it's always been done, because taking time out to change it is going to put it at risk.
Put, put getting things done at risk.
[00:09:33] Speaker A: Right, Right.
[00:09:36] Speaker B: I have another thought on, on where this challenge comes in. The written down process versus the actual process and the workarounds. And this is about an unrealistic expectation that software will fix everything.
If we just find the right piece of software, we're going to solve this problem and we won't have to do anything differently.
I think a lot of software sales teams lend themselves to that myth. I think even beyond the individual software vendors right now we have a culture, a cultural shift around artificial intelligence and the almost magic way that they talk about it, that it is that AI is discussed in the media and, and online, that people's expectations of what a piece of software can do for you are huge.
And they, they, they often ignore the reality of actually getting your data in a good, in good shape. To make these things work is a critical step and everybody skips that or artificial intelligence is not actually a substitute for human decision making and judgment.
Better artificial intelligence systems have more, more human judgment built in in the way of decision trees and clear thresholds of when you pick one choice over another. And it's all about the setup of the AI program and the source of the data that makes it do a lot more for you.
But it's still using the human judgment in there.
So I think that's a big piece and I think that's getting worse even than it was because in fact, the word processor, the original word processing software systems, they were a big improvement over a typewriter because if you made a mistake, you could erase it and you didn't have to use whiteout or the correcting, selecting typewriter I had in college that you could back up and type over.
You could fix it. And then they got a little bit smarter and you could set margins without having to use a ruler and you could center things without having to go to the center and count back spaces.
[00:12:22] Speaker A: I remember that.
[00:12:25] Speaker B: But then they got too smart and they started imposing styles that you didn't necessarily want.
When you start typing a series of dashes across the screen, and you only want to go halfway across just to set things off. It is really hard to get Microsoft not to make that go across the whole page. It's very hard, very true. Or you can't figure out why when you indent one level down on a list, it pops halfway across the screen.
You have to really work at it now. Almost as hard as you had to work at it back on the typewriter when you were doing everything by hand.
Now you have to figure out, why is my Word document doing this to me?
Why?
[00:13:09] Speaker A: No, I've never used the tab button as much as I have today's more important thing.
It used to be the space bar that you hit so many times. Now it's the tab button because it tells you the word and it almost completes the sentence for you if you just keep pressing tab.
[00:13:29] Speaker B: Yeah, it's not always right. And then you have to erase what it did.
[00:13:32] Speaker A: Right. It's definitely not always right.
[00:13:34] Speaker B: It sent you something that it thinks was the answer you wanted, but it's not. And then you have to go back. So I think that faith in software and it adds to our problems.
[00:13:50] Speaker A: Well, we paid this much for software. It must work well.
[00:13:54] Speaker B: And also we think we don't need as many people.
And we, for instance, really don't have the whole world of clerical staff that used to exist because everybody's supposed to be their own records manager now.
And so that's a huge change. And that's in, you know, it's in the 21st century, which seems.
Which is a highfalutin phrase, but like, it's within the work lives of most of our clients and ourselves. And so the way you work is completely different from the way we started out working.
I never used a typewriter at work, but.
But I certainly did in college and just a few years before I was in.
In work, in the work world, people were still using typewriters and paper folders. And we've seen that that all shift. So the processes have taken a much bigger leap than the software really supports.
So those are my three things.
Well, yours, yours, you had the middle one. But the expectation versus the of when will this get done? Versus how long it takes to do it.
We've always done it this way. Combined with we don't want to let anybody down by changing something and having it break.
And the third one of sort of unrealistic faith in software to solve our problems.
So those are the three reasons, I think that gets that are behind the differences between the process as we lay it out and the process, how it really happens, that works.
[00:15:39] Speaker A: Do you want to talk about some practical steps people can do to fix some of these things?
[00:15:45] Speaker B: I don't.
I don't. Because it's not a quick. It's not a quick thing.
[00:15:51] Speaker A: It's definitely not a quick thing.
[00:15:52] Speaker B: I think that we should save that for the next episode.
[00:15:55] Speaker A: All right. That works.
If you have any questions, please send us an email at info trailblazer.us.com or look us up on the web at www.trailblazer.us.com or at the Learning Academy, which Learning Academy, which is www.trailblazerlearningacademy.com. thank you for listening and please tune in to our next episode. If you like this episode, please be a champion. Share it with people in your social media network like or subscribe to. Our podcast would also help. As always, we appreciate you, the listeners. Special thanks goes to Jason Blake, who created our music.
[00:16:31] Speaker B: Before we go, I just want to say I didn't, I wasn't trying to make just have a cliffhanger for the sake of teasing. The next episode.
I don't want to give a quick answer to what is a complex problem.
[00:16:43] Speaker A: Makes sense to me.
[00:16:44] Speaker B: All right, see you next time.
