I had an unexpectedly useful exchange with my dad recently about a water pump on our property. 

A previous tenant at the property had turned a pump off because he believed it was only for fire use and said it was keeping him awake at night. The handbook says the pump can be used in the event of a fire. It doesn’t say it’s only for that, but that’s how it was understood. 

Once it was switched off, the effects weren’t obvious straight away…over time, the dam stopped feeding a holding tank. The tank stopped supplying water to other parts of the property. And what started as a small, well-intentioned decision slowly became a wider system issue. 

No one was being careless. Everyone was acting on what they thought was the right information. The problem was simply that the decision was made in isolation, without a clear line of sight to what else relied on that pump to function. 

We see this pattern regularly in property. 

A clause is read narrowly. 

A policy is applied in a way that focuses on the words, without recognising the context that sits around them. 

A change is made to one part of a system without fully appreciating what sits upstream or downstream. 

Nothing is necessarily “wrong” with the asset or decision. Things just stop working the way they were designed to because the intent behind them gets lost. 

Property portfolios are systems in the same way that the pump, the dam and the holding tank were part of a single system. They exist to support people, functions and outcomes, not as isolated assets. When one part changes, the effects rarely stay contained. 

We recently worked with a government organisation where a business unit urgently needed additional space to support a new function. The requirement was legitimate and time-critical, so the team procured a small standalone site directly, outside the usual accommodation process. On its own, the decision made full business sense. It solved a workforce need quickly and supported an immediate operational outcome.

What wasn’t visible at the time was how that single decision interacted with the broader portfolio. The existing lease commitments, planned consolidations, upcoming expiries, and assumptions already embedded in forward accommodation strategies.

Over time, that one site began to influence other decisions. Planned exits became harder. Consolidation assumptions no longer held. And lease negotiations elsewhere became more complex because the system had quietly changed. No process was bypassed recklessly. The issue wasn’t the decision itself. It was that a local solution had portfolio-wide consequences. 

Once the organisation stepped back and looked at the requirement through a whole-of-portfolio lens, the original intent was clear and so were the unintended downstream impacts. The value didn’t come from undoing the decision. It came from reconnecting it to the broader system it sat within. 

This is also where workforce and property often intersect.

Workforce strategies are frequently developed in one part of an organisation, while property strategies sit in another. Each may be sound in its own right, but if they are not developed with a clear line of sight to each other, the system begins to behave in unintended ways.

Headcount changes, new functions or location shifts quietly reshape the property requirement. At the same time, lease commitments and portfolio strategies place real constraints around what the workforce plan can achieve.

If those connections are not visible, the organisation ends up solving problems one decision at a time, rather than managing the system as a whole. Space appears in the wrong places. Consolidations stall. New sites are taken up to address immediate pressures, and the overall cost of the portfolio begins to drift.

The most productive step is usually to pause and ask a couple of simple questions:

• What is this meant to support?
• What else depends on it?
• And how does it fit within the wider system?

That is often where clarity comes from, and it is where real value for money is found.

We generally find strongest property outcomes come when policy, workforce and property decisions are understood as parts of the same system, rather than separate conversations.

These outcomes tend to be achieved when intent is clear and decisions are made with a full view of the system they operate within, including the people the property is there to support.

Because, more often than not, it isn’t the pump that causes the problem. It’s the missing connection between the pump and everything that depends on it.