Ask a surgeon how they perform a knee reconstruction and they will walk you through a method. They follow a sequence of steps refined over decades of research, peer review, and clinical practice. Ask an accountant how they conduct an audit and they will refer you to established standards that guide everything from planning to reporting. Ask an engineer how they design a bridge and they will point to structural methodologies tested across centuries of use.

Now ask a strata manager how they run a strata scheme. You will almost certainly get a different answer every time. Not because the people are incompetent, but because no one has ever given them a method to follow.

Why do other disciplines have structured methods and strata doesn’t?

Other fields have clear methods since their professions developed them from the ground up. In the 1990s, Robert Kaplan and David Norton developed the Balanced Scorecard. This strategic management framework transformed how organisations translate vision into measurable operational performance. Before it existed, many businesses were flying blind, measuring success by financial results alone. The Balanced Scorecard gave them a method.

Medicine has evidence-based practice protocols that dictate how conditions are diagnosed and treated. Law has case management frameworks. Construction has project delivery methods like Design-Build and Integrated Project Delivery. Every serious discipline eventually reaches a point where it says: we need a better way to do this, and then someone builds it.

Read: Do we have what it takes to become a profession?

What happens when you manage without a method?

When you manage without a method, you manage reactively. Strata management has operated this way for more than fifty years. The manager responds to whatever lands in the inbox first. The committee meeting becomes a forum for whoever shouts loudest. Maintenance gets deferred because no one has a structured process to ensure it is addressed in the right sequence at the right time. Financial planning takes a back seat to the latest crisis.

The consequences are visible across the industry. Profit margins have been squeezed. Staff turnover remains stubbornly high. Owners are frustrated. Managers are burnt out. Committees lurch from one issue to the next without ever feeling in control. The Macquarie Bank 2026 Strata Benchmarking Report confirmed what many already suspected. Strata management businesses are working harder for less, with median EBITDA dropping from 23% to 19.4% in three years.

Read: Foundations That Last: Why Strata Needs More Than Quick Fixes

Is it possible to build a method for strata from the ground up?

It is not only possible, it is overdue. The raw materials already exist. Strata legislation spells out the responsibilities. Best practice is understood by the experienced operators who do this work well. The gap is not knowledge. The gap is a lack of a structured system. This system should organise knowledge into a repeatable, teachable, and measurable method.

Consider what Kaplan and Norton did with the Balanced Scorecard. They did not invent strategy. They organised it. They gave leaders a framework that connected financial performance with customer satisfaction, internal processes, and learning and growth. They turned intuition into discipline. Strata management needs the same transformation. Not a new idea, but a new way of organising existing responsibilities so that nothing falls through the cracks, and everyone knows what comes next.

Read: Announcing a method to the madness

What would a proper strata method look like?

A proper strata method would do what every good operational framework does. It would categorise the work into logical components. It would sequence those components so the workload is distributed evenly across the year rather than crammed into a frantic pre-AGM rush. It would provide standard operating procedures so that quality and consistency do not depend on the individual manager’s memory or experience. And it would shift the default setting of strata management from reactive firefighting to proactive governance.

This is not a wish list. It is what every other professional discipline takes for granted. The question for strata is not whether a method is needed. The question is why it has taken so long for someone to build one. Watch this space.

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