Handover amnesia: why every committee starts from zero
What gets lost at handover is not the documents — it is the context. And the reason it keeps happening is that the entire benefit accrues to somebody other than the person being asked to do the work.
A managing committee turns over every year or two, and in most societies almost nothing survives the transition. The outgoing secretary hands across a folder and an explanation, and the incoming committee spends its first quarter rediscovering things.
What actually gets lost
Not the documents, usually — those are findable. What is lost is context. Why the lift vendor was changed. What was agreed with the builder about the terrace. Which resolutions from the last general body remain unexecuted. Which member has a live grievance and what was said to them.
Some of that is merely wasteful. Some is damaging: a commitment to a resident forgotten, a vendor dispute reopened because the settlement was never recorded, a decision reversed because nobody knew why it was taken in the first place.
The access nobody revokes
There is a less discussed version of the same problem. Former office bearers routinely retain bank mandates, system logins and physical custody of records for years after leaving office, because revoking access is nobody’s job on the day it should happen.
If you read this and cannot immediately say who currently holds access to your society’s accounts, that is worth checking this week rather than at the next handover.
Why it does not get fixed
Because the beneficiary of a good handover is the next committee, not the current one. Asking an outgoing secretary to spend a weekend writing a handover document is asking for unpaid work whose entire value accrues to someone else — and it does not reliably happen.
The only version that works is one that assembles itself: financial position, open tasks and their owners, live contracts with renewal dates, ongoing disputes, pending statutory filings, and the decision log for the tenure. Generated rather than compiled, because generated is the difference between a handover that exists and one that was intended.