The sector faces structural pressures, but leaders still have a major productivity opportunity inside critical workflows.
Hey Reader,
The Productivity Commission’s National Water Reform inquiry has made productivity a live leadership issue for the water sector.
WSAA’s response highlights a sobering measure: conventional productivity data show the utilities sector declining by nearly 40% since 2000–01. On those measures, utilities have been Australia’s weakest-performing industry.
The broader productivity numbers provide important context. The ABS reports that long term labour productivity growth had slowed to an average of 0.8% a year by 2023–24. The Productivity Commission’s latest quarterly bulletin reported that labour productivity fell again in the March 2026 quarter and grew by only 0.3% over the year, with hours worked continuing to outpace output.
But that does not mean Australia’s businesses are poorly run.
WSAA argues that for the water industry, the numbers reflect the scale of the water transition. Water organisations are investing more labour and capital to replace ageing assets, support housing growth, improve treatment, protect waterways, strengthen resilience and reduce reliance on natural systems that were previously treated as free inputs. At the same time, pressure to restrain prices can reduce measured industry output.
The sector cannot optimise its way out of inadequate funding, structural reform or the rising cost of the water transition. But more people, more hours and more activity are not producing more value. Water and public purpose organisations cannot meet rising expectations simply by asking stretched teams to absorb more complexity.
Smart leaders are turning inwards to look at ways to reduce the capacity lost inside their own organisations through better use of systems, technology and their people.
As external costs rise, the hidden internal cost of how critical work gets done can no longer be ignored.
Faster tools may help. But faster work is not necessarily better work.
The controllable productivity problem
Water’s productivity challenge is partly structural. But some of the cost is internal and controllable.
It sits in the time spent locating information, reconciling versions, rewriting reports, manually checking work and asking senior people to repair problems late in the process.
These costs rarely appear as one budget line. But they consume capacity, delay decisions and reduce the time available for judgement, engagement and delivery.
The organisation eventually produces the outcome. But how much time did it really take? How much executive attention did it consume? And how much of that effort improved the result?
Faster work is creating more rework
New AI tools are helping organisations search, summarise, compare and draft information more quickly.
Those gains are useful. But what I am finding in organisations newly adopting AI tools is that weak processes or unchecked work might have them completed faster but the result can be unreliable, decontextualised or expensive (timely) for experienced staff to review.
A poorly framed decision paper does not become more useful because its first draft appeared in ten minutes. A report does not become more reliable because inconsistent information was summarised quickly. A business case does not become more defensible because the language sounds polished.
Faster production can even increase internal cost.
More material is generated. More versions circulate. Confident language disguises unresolved assumptions. Senior staff receive longer drafts to review rather than clearer questions to answer.
The organisation becomes faster at producing work without becoming better at achieving the outcome.
Start with the outcome
A better workflow begins before drafting.
It starts by clarifying the outcome being sought, the decision required, the evidence needed, the points where the process could fail and where quality control and professional judgement must enter.
Only then should an organisation decide what can be standardised, simplified, automated or supported by better tools.
That is very different from asking staff to complete the existing process faster.
It means redesigning the work around the outcome. These tools can support greater consistency and quality, but only when the underlying knowledge, rules and review points are clear.
What this looks like in practice
Grantus is currently working with a large not for profit organisation to improve several critical process lines.
The initial expectation was that Copilot could be applied to the existing work to make it faster.
We began by mapping how the work actually got done, identified where context was lost, clarified operating rules, organised the knowledge the process depended on and introduced quality checks before ideas or writing gets out of hand.
Only then did we determine where tools could retrieve knowledge, reduce repetition, test completeness and support stronger drafts.
The redesigned workflow combines clearer stages, explicit rules, reusable organisational knowledge, embedded quality checks and defined human review points.
The aim is not merely faster production. It is less rework, more consistent quality and more time for staff to apply judgement to the problems that matter.
Internal workflow improvement will not resolve the sector’s broader funding, pricing and investment challenges. But better internal systems can help organisations use scarce capability more effectively, prepare stronger decisions and reduce avoidable cost while those larger reforms are pursued.
New tools, established disciplines
I have not approached this work as an AI evangelist.
Over the past three years, I have deliberately built deeper technical capability, including engaging a rocket scientist to help me improve how I prompt, design agents and apply new tools to business workflows.
But the technology is only part of the answer.
My foundation is more than 25 years of work involving ISO 9001, quality auditing, governance, process mapping, reporting, policies, procedures and checklists.
Those disciplines teach you to ask:
What outcome must the process produce? Where can it fail? What knowledge needs to be explicit? What evidence demonstrates that the work was completed properly? Where is a standard rule appropriate, and where is professional judgement essential?
The newer tools give those established disciplines far greater leverage.
They can make organisational knowledge easier to access, support more consistent application of rules, expose missing information earlier and reduce repetitive administration.
But they create value only when the workflow, knowledge, rules and quality expectations are clear.
The executive productivity question
For executives considering productivity and cost management, the starting question should be:
Where is our organisation working too hard for the outcome it gets?
Choose one critical workflow. Examine how long it really takes, how many people touch it, how many times it is reviewed, where work is repeated and how much senior intervention it requires.
Then improve the workflow before accelerating it.
Clarify the outcome. Standardise what should be consistent. Organise the knowledge the work depends on. Remove low value repetition. Introduce quality checks before problems become expensive. Preserve human judgement for the points where it changes the result.
That is where meaningful productivity gains will be found. In one workflow, early results indicate that work previously requiring around 30 hours can now be completed in approximately four, with defined quality checks embedded throughout the process. This includes drafting, evidence retrieval and initial quality review, but excludes final professional approval.
Where is your organisation working too hard for the outcome it gets?
Grantus helps leaders solve complex organisational problems where strategy, investment, workflow, evidence and human judgement intersect.
Our work has long helped organisations attract investment by strengthening decisions, evidence and the cases behind them. We are now applying those same disciplines more broadly; helping leaders reduce rework, strengthen critical workflows and make difficult organisational decisions with greater clarity and confidence.
This is not a move away from investment attraction. It is a natural extension of what Grantus has always done: bringing structure, quality and trusted judgement to important problems that are costly to ignore and too consequential to get wrong.
Cheers, Simon.