I do not believe that it is useful to speak about change in a purely abstract or impersonal fashion. The changes about which we should talk are your changes, and they are going to affect your role and you, personally. Further, the changes coming are either going to find you as their author or their victim. There will be no way for you to stand on the sidelines for this dance.

It appears to many that you are on a collision course with one of the great forces in the world today – that many of your roles and functions are slated for replacement by computers and software, and that soon you will be good candidates for downsizing. Neither of these outcomes is inevitable, but you do have formidable opponents. One opponent is the shallow common sense of our time about what you do, and another is the enormous resources of the information industry that claims that it can handle "all the data" more efficiently.

I am certain that your essential role cannot be replaced by computers. However, I am also certain that but you are competing with the computer industry to define the stories that determine how money, prestige, and the power to act are going to be allocated to your discipline. You have been asleep, or largely silent, in the struggle to define the language and distinctions that set the story line – the identities and standards in which we interpret the value of what you do. The computer industry is insisting that the key terms have to do with the capture, storage, transmission, and retrieval of data and information; that the essence of your work is the evaluation, storage, and cataloging of information. If that becomes the substance of the winning story about your work, then it will spell an end to the future of your discipline as you know it.

I invite you to construct another story, based in language other than that of the information industry. Your new story must take account of the historical role your discipline plays as your institutions are involved in the making of history.

Deliberate, conscious history-making calls for a sensibility to distinctions not often present in our age. The history maker, not to be confused with the historian, is sensitive to the centrality of listening to concerns and taking care of clients, to moods and emotions, to co-ordination and the promises we make, and to seeing these as fundamental structuring elements of work. Such an interpretation turns our typical way of seeing the world of work on its head. The current historical moment is a cross-roads of interpretations.

Changes All Around

We are surrounded and enmeshed in changes today, in many domains of our lives. We are beset by changes in our workplaces, in how employers interact with employees, in the tools we use, and in the way we talk to each other. In many walks of life, lifetime employment is gone forever as a style of work relationship. Government departments as well as businesses have downsized and turned to subcontracting as a way of providing many essential services, often to firms with less secure labor conditions.

These are not mere changes in tastes, fashion, and fads. All around us we can see changes in who and what we think we are, and what we consider to be our possibilities (and impossibilities) in life.

One important feature of many of these changes is the way that networks and computers, by increasingly mediating our interactions with each other and our environment, figure in our emerging new ways of being and working. Computers and networks are emerging as the eventual dominant medium for commerce and the invention of identities.

What is Changing, and What is Stable?

When we say change, we reveal our interpretation that some thing or some phenomenon has been transformed; that one thing has taken the place of another, or followed another; or that some new variety or variation of thing or phenomenon has emerged. What appears to be changing depends upon who is looking and where you stand to look. In the recent past we have changed the tools we use to produce local records of language, from typewriters to word processors to networked word processors. Then we invented desktop publishing and laser printing, and found ourselves transforming typesetting and printing.

These are tremendous changes, and yet, if we look from another perspective, a great deal also is stable. For example, every organization constitutes itself with declarations about a regular set of structures. Competent managers continuously adjust the offers of the institution, the technologies it uses, and its division of labor (roles and processes) to keep "tuned" to clients. We can observe this when the fast food giant McDonald’s begins to allow customers to customize their hamburger orders, in response to the lead of Burger King, one of its chief competitors, in this domain; and when the California Department of Motor Vehicles, infamous for its rigid bureaucracy and slow service, offers customers the possibility of making appointments for service, rather than enduring the long lines that invariably face the drop-in customer. Regardless of changes in who performs and how, the fact of accountabilities to take care of client concerns does not change.

Over the last years, you have been drifting towards the interpretation that your essential role lives in the areas most changed by information technology. I insist that is a serious mistake. The core of your role needs to be understood in the stabilities. To enter the future well, we must pay attention to those aspects of life that are stable. At the same time we must accept that some of our historical interpretations are bunk, and we must declare, carefully, what we will carry with us from the past into the future.

Stability in the Whirlwind’s Midst

I offer the following distinctions for thinking about what is stable in the midst of today’s whirlwind of changes:

1. Concerns are at the center. People gather together in institutions and enterprises to take care of sets of concerns that make sense in their culture at a moment in time. Without the commitment to take care of concerns that matter to people, there is no meaningful action. Some of our concerns are permanent: food, shelter, family, health, community, spirituality, and so forth. Others shift as we cultivate different ways of being.

Another stable feature of our institutions and enterprises is that people’s moods and their emotional reactions to their worlds are connected deeply to these concerns. When our concerns are taken care of we are more or less tranquil; when we take care of our own concerns we are proud. When our concerns are in danger we are alert and in action, or, if we think that nothing can be done, resigned and/or resentful.

Listening to/for concerns is fundamental to the process of creation, appraisal, and management of records. The criteria for these actions are devised in the practice of listening, and it is precisely this aspect of your work that information technology cannot replace.

Information technology can help you to listen better, but information technology cannot listen. It can record noises, but it cannot re-member the past or produce interpretations about its implications for the future. This is what you have been working to accomplish, and you are necessary. I urge you not to surrender to the shallow interpretations offered by information technology – your opportunity to define how all of us will interpret our pasts and invent our futures.

2. How action happens is stable. "You are hired" or "You are fired" is not information, and it cannot be adjudged or predicted from history. It is an invention, brought forth in language, in which a new set of future possibilities appears.

Often the computer industry leads our culture in our tendency to confuse communication and information, as if they were the same things. They are two 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 co-ordination of actions. As we listen to each other’s concerns, we make requests, offers, promises and assessments, declarations and assertions. The earliest recorded work of archivists was concerned exclusively with making and maintaining records of exactly these speech acts as they were made by royalty and the ruling and priestly classes.

Listening and speaking in ways that support the invention of new futures, as archivists and records managers are called upon to do, is creative and not mechanical work. It is a stable competence that is going to be enriched, not replaced, by the emerging technologies.

3. Trust and mistrust are foundational. Inscriptions play a fundamental role in the constitution of trust. To trust a community of people to take care of concerns that matter to us, we must see that the community is competent for making and taking care of inscriptions, because we know that we cannot trust our memories for reliable reportage about what has been requested, promised and fulfilled, what remains to be fulfilled, and what promises are pending. One of the principal contributions of the archivist and the records manager to the constitution of trust in the community is the way that, by judicious design and management of archives, the role of a fair and reliable witness is available in the community.

The phenomena of trust and mistrust are stable, as are the roles that they play in our ability effectively to co-ordinate action in every community. However, the size and number of communities with which we are interacting are growing, which daily gives us greater opportunities to form trusting and/or mistrusting relationships.

Inscriptions and Change

On the other hand, the media through which we speak, listen, and co-ordinate action with each other is changing rapidly and radically. With the world-wide appearance of computers and networks, our capacity to create and manipulate inscriptions has entered a new era. What is especially significant about current technological developments is that they are transforming the technological space of communication and inscription together. Formerly, I typed a letter, made a copy, and filed it. Today, I type and address a message on the computer, and in one stroke I have composed, delivered, and stored it. Further, if I have designed my network well, others who I designate have immediate access to what I just said. If they wish, 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 communication, and in making and managing inscriptions.

In response to the new opportunities for communication that the computer and network technologies are opening up, people are inventing new ways of taking care of old concerns, and inventing new concerns. The computers and networks offer a new kind of capacity to speak, listen, comment, request, purchase, promise, read, and write, and at the same time automatically to make inscriptions recording any speech act that happens across the network.

Roughly two years ago, for example, General Electric opened a web page, http://www.tpn.geis.com/, where it could have conversations with its suppliers: it posted requests for things and services it wanted to purchase, and suppliers made offers there. Over two billion dollars of business has passed through that web page. They offer there:

As a result of this offer, GE can no longer be understood primarily as a company that manufactures and sells electrical products and services connected with those products. GE discovered that by beginning to do business with their suppliers in this new media, they had actually constructed a new marketplace. Others clamored to be admitted to do business there, and GE agreed, becoming in that moment the convenors of a new marketplace. The web is shifting the space of communication we live in. We can observe the emergence of communities that could not be formed before, transactions that could not have been completed before, and promises that cannot have happened before. If we know how to observe, we are watching history being made.

What Will Be Your Role in the Midst of All This?

What is going to happen to your field, to its people and practices in the midst of these changes? As a way of thinking about this, I suggest you develop a working familiarity with the history of what happened with the emergence of desktop publishing (DTP). While the technological changes impacting your roles today dwarf those of DTP, nevertheless the changes around DTP were rich and deep, and we can use it as an analogy to what is happening to your technological and professional possibilities.

To have a powerful story, we must begin with the clear interpretation that the technology we are observing, and the practices that it enters and transforms, all serve stable, deep, and abiding human concerns. As we watch the metamorphosis of tools we must keep our attention on those underlying concerns and on how the tools assist us in interpreting, taking care of , and even clarifying and evolving those concerns. In the case of DTP, the underlying concerns have to do with how we listen to and communicate expressively with one another.

The paraphernalia of desktop publishing enabled a writer of text to specify the form of the text and the composition of the page; in other words, to engage in practices that used to belong to the field of typesetting and graphic design. The effect, for every person who writes and has access to the equipment, has been to enrich tremendously the capacity to express oneself in writing. Text can be made more arresting, appealing, approachable, and can be presented in ways that evoke the expressiveness of heartfelt oral language.

When desktop publishing first appeared, few people in the fields of graphic design, printing, or publishing paid close attention. Since then, however, the employment effects have been dramatic, transforming old jobs, opening new opportunities, closing others, and reinforcing certain central historical practices. One of the most substantial changes has been in the role of secretaries. Out of the evolution of word processing and DTP, we now have only a small fraction of the number of secretaries – meaning people in the role of preparing text by working at keyboards – at work in our organizations. But meanwhile, we have separated out another part of the traditional role of the secretary – arranging meetings, managing conversations, and following up on commitments – and we have institutionalized that as an autonomous and new role that we call "administrative assistant". This is a good example of the kinds of transformations that we construct in the midst of organizational and technological changes.

Today this new field, only ten years old, is already relatively stable. We can take for granted our ability to manipulate its hardware and software tools, and the transformation of roles it has engendered. This regularity and stability belies the turbulent and contingent beginnings of the "new" capability of desktop publishing.

What roles will be available to archivists and records administrators? As occurred with the professions involved in the world of print production and publishing, some or many of your roles are bound to change, and there may take place a blurring of the lines between your current roles and the roles of librarians, historians, even computer programmers. Those parts of work that can be reliably described by algorithms; the parts that are truly comprised of mechanistic repetition of activities that do not require human listening, judgement, or commitment for their successful completion, will likely be taken over by computers.

But that sort of work is not the essence of what you do. The core of your practices is to assist in the making of history, not the labeling and storage of data.

The Challenges of Change

Living with, adapting to, inviting, bringing, leading and/or resisting changes present a series of challenges.

1. Become involved. To be involved means to care and to become competent for taking care of what matters to you. We involve ourselves in and make declarations about what we care about. Competence in life, the capacity to do the right kinds of prioritization in modern life, to decline what we will not do, and serenity and satisfaction with life come from involvement in it.

2. Appropriate a role that works, and thrive in it. I suggest that you adopt and develop yourself in constructive roles that allow you to construct a meaningful life in the midst of whatever changes come. You may elect to lead, act as a responsible follower, or be a judicious observer. Standing outside as an uninvolved critic or victim is not a constructive role.

3. Become competent to bring and coordinate action. I have been speaking from a new interpretation about how action is brought, universally. People make requests and promises, and constitute networks of commitment among themselves. That is where intentional, recurrent action always starts. In this regard, I recommend you go to work, and begin to re-interpret and re-articulate how action happens in your organizations. Then mobilize to change some of those practices.

In my experience there are two great impediments to successfully mobilizing a new practice in any organization, public or private. The impediments are the same in public and private organizations.

• Misleading common sense about how change is brought in organizations. Nearly everyone carries around in their background a set of strong, taken-for-granted interpretations about how people bring change. In Western countries today, most of those interpretations are misleading or simply wrong. For example, a common interpretation today is that to effect lasting change, we must wait for consensus.

• Rigid historical styles and persistent moods of resignation and resentment. These are the kinds of moods and emotional constructions in which people cannot listen to the possibility of doing something new and then commit themselves to that.

  
  

On the other hand, I count four key elements for a successful mobilization.

• Listening. People in the organization must commit to develop a capacity to listen to the concerns of others sensitively and in a fresh way. Without that, no new possibilities show up.

• Emotions and Moods. Learn to observe and help shape the moods and emotions that appear in people. These are not details, but the background in which we encounter the world. Typically the two biggest hurdles are anxiety and resignation.

• Commitment (Promises): The critical ingredient in any mobilization of change is always a serious commitment by a few people who are convinced that by making some change they will be better able to take care of the concerns of others. Those few then show the opportunity to others

• Games and Scoreboards. It is always easier to bring a change in practices if the process of getting there is structured as a set of games in which employees win when customers get taken care of. Scoreboards show everyone how they are doing in the games.

4. Learn to listen to anomalies and be astute about innovation. Learn how to separate the wheat from the chaff — to discern the changes that are just beginning, or are about to begin, that spell new opportunities, and the old practices that are going away. Anomalies are the small, sometimes annoying and sometimes nearly invisible ways in which the future shows up in the present.

5. Build a wise historical interpretation. 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. You need to apply the best traditions of your work to preparing the space for interpreting where your discipline is headed, or else it is likely to end up where it is headed, and many or most of you will find yourselves replaced by computers.

I am not saying that the traditional mechanics and activities of your field are no longer important. 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. 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 your institution’s 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.

Once you produce a new interpretation, and build a new story, then the job is to cultivate practices of living and working that give the people in your field the opportunity to invent meaningful lives for themselves. Here, the little examples of desktop publishing, and now the networked Internet era, can be helpful. 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.

A Branch in the Road

You have arrived at a branch in the road. The tradition in which your discipline has been moving has been recently shaped in powerful ways by the language and thinking of what I call "The Cartesian Information Clearing" - and has led to the interpretation that records professionals are paid for doing things that overlap with the jobs of computers. This is much deeper than a question of semantics. It is a question of interpretation, jobs, and livelihoods, and, from my point of view, that means that members of your discipline should be well-prepared to deal with this question.

To put it to you directly: you need to apply the best traditions of your work to preparing the space for interpreting where your discipline is headed, or else it is likely to end up where it is headed, and many or most of you will find yourselves replaced by computers. True, 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. On the other hand, the real centre of your work could be damaged or lost for some period of time, and that would be a tragedy for all of us.

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 emphasise: 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. 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.

Closing Thoughts

The customer is a recent invention in both public and private domains. In the public domain, we used to be the public, and the lawmakers decided our fates, even if we did elect them. In the private domain, we used to be consumers. Now, in both domains, we, the democratic public, are emerging as customers, and in that capacity we are now the emerging or already present dominant force in the lives of those institutions. Businesses are not in business merely to make profit. They are in business to take care of the concerns of their customers, and if they do that well, they make a profit at it. There is an analogous truth for public institutions.

The activities of your discipline, properly, have always been oriented to the past, and that orients you to the past. In the same way that auditors and accountants are oriented to the past, that fact affects powerfully the way that many of you interact with the world. For the challenges of re-inventing your discipline that I believe you confront over the coming years, that orientation to the past is a serious weakness that you must overcome. In that challenge, I wish you luck and I offer my solidarity, for a future without a rich extension of the discipline you have been tending for so many centuries is less interesting to me than one with you bringing re-membrance to all of us as one of our key inheritances.