I recently sat through more than two hours of an apartment building AGM to give a presentation that took about five minutes.

The proposal was straightforward.

The questions were reasonable.

The discussion was brief.

It was approved.

Which made me think about where the actual work had occurred.

It wasn’t in the five minute presentation.

Most of the friction was simply getting the decision to the point where it could be made.

That isn’t necessarily criticism of strata governance. Owners have every right to understand what is being proposed for their building, and some decisions deserve considerable scrutiny.

But operationally, there’s an interesting distinction between:

the complexity of a decision

and

the process required to reach it.

They’re not always the same thing.

A relatively simple decision can travel through a surprisingly long chain.

Someone identifies the issue.

Someone researches an option.

Someone prepares a proposal.

The building manager reviews it.

The strata manager becomes involved.

The committee discusses it.

More information is requested.

It goes onto an agenda.

Eventually everyone gets into the same room and the decision takes five minutes.

None of those individual steps is necessarily wrong.

But every handoff adds time, another opportunity for something to stall and another chance for a straightforward decision to become harder than the decision itself.

That matters because when organisations talk about becoming more efficient, the instinct is often to improve the task.

Make the presentation clearer.

Make the proposal shorter.

Build better technology.

Automate another step.

Sometimes the task isn’t where the friction lives.

Sometimes the five minute job is already a five minute job.

The two hours are somewhere else.

And that gives me a question I suspect I’ll keep coming back to:

How much of the time required to get something done is actually spent doing it?