Succession plans for strata schemes may sound a little ambitious, given the barely organised chaos in which many owners corporations operate. But I was listening to a podcast about football – the world game – and the commentators were talking about a manager (or coach) who had just been sacked.

“When would they have started looking at a succession plan?” one talking head asked.

“As soon as the ink dried on the new manager’s contract,” another pundit replied.

Why?  Because they know the incumbent is going to be leaving at some point and they want to have identified potential successors, mapped their progress in their current jobs and be ready to make the transition as swiftly and efficiently as possible.

And that made me think about strata committees.  Is this the only area of life, or politics at least, where a successor to the person in charge hasn’t been identified and even prepared for a takeover if and when needed?

Rupert Murdoch has taken his family to court to be able to anoint his successor, President Trump has JD Vance – although he didn’t turn out to be the human shield against potential assassination that he might have hoped.

It’s hard to position a prospect that’s even worse than you as your replacement when you are about as bad as it gets.

Here in Australia, as his successor, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has … um … Richard Marles?

When you think about how complicated being the chair of an owners corporation is – at least, if you’re doing it right –  all the stuff you need to know, and the interpersonal relationships you have to navigate, it seems odd that there usually isn’t a deputy ready to step up when the incumbent is unexpectedly unavailable, has had enough or the owners have had enough of them.

The secretary would be the obvious choice.  Let him or her chair the occasional meeting.  Give them specific projects to manage and a couple of sub-committees to manage.

Speaking of which, sub-committees are terrific bodies for discovering new talent – people who haven’t been elected yet but could be.  And it gives potential committee members a chance to test the water and see if they would enjoy this at all.

Of course, this doesn’t take into account chairpersons with, shall we say, Trumpy tendencies. These characters tend to see potential successors as threats and one way to deal with that is to get themselves elected into both roles – chair AND secretary.

And that, of course, makes the need for a successor to be identified more crucial than ever. Otherwise we continue the three spoked cycle of strata politics – anarchy followed by democracy, then autocracy, before everything  descends into anarchy again.

So come on chairpersons of strata schemes: identify and anoint your successors … if you dare.

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