The Succession Decade

I. An accident of cohort

In the next ten years, an historically-large number of the world's most influential organisations will experience a transfer of ownership. These transfers have a demographically-based reason. The current group of senior leaders responsible for the organisational design of many of today's critical-institutional frameworks have all reached ages (60–75) where they will either retire, pass on their responsibilities to others, or be replaced during the next decade. While some may debate the exact timeline, there is no dispute regarding the statistical reality of these individuals' retirement and transition from responsibility.

There are numerous names associated with organisations experiencing succession crises. In May 2021, Warren Buffett announced that he had selected Greg Abel to succeed him as head of Berkshire Hathaway. The potential future replacements for Jamie Dimon, Chief Executive Officer of JPMorgan Chase, have been widely reported. Several key principals of the world's largest sovereign wealth funds, the United Arab Emirates, Singapore, Norway and Saudi Arabia, have approximately five years remaining until their tenure concludes. The global community of central bank governors will also see considerable turnover. There will be new generations of European and Asian heads-of-government shaped by entirely different experiences than those currently leading. Almost every Chief Executive Officer appointed to the world's largest multinational corporations, commercial banks, oil companies and food retailers between 2008 and 2014 will reach the conclusion of their service.

Generational successions occur frequently throughout history. However, never before has there occurred a succession crisis as large in scale as the one described above during a time period as short as ten years. This succession crisis has not received sufficient attention to date. We propose in this paper that the 2030s will be a "Succession Decade." We argue that this decade represents an unprecedented number of institutions transitioning out of office over a relatively brief time frame, that how well each institution prepares will determine whether it is better off or worse off after the transition, and that most institutions are poorly positioned because the gaps exist structurally rather than individually. The costs associated with inadequate planning for succession are greater than previously recognised by the institutional community.

II. What succession plans actually do

Most institutions believe they have a succession plan. Pressed, the chief executive will produce a document. The document will name a successor. It will list two or three credible alternatives. It will describe the criteria by which the choice was made and is reviewed. It will be approved by a board nominations committee at appropriate intervals.

This is not a succession plan. It is a replacement plan. The two are different, and the difference is the subject of this essay.

A replacement plan ensures that when a principal departs, another principal is available. It does not ensure that the institution operates the same way, makes the same kinds of decisions, weighs the same trade-offs, or expresses the same values. The replacement is, by design, a different person. The continuity that boards typically inspect is the continuity of the role, the seat does not stay empty, not the continuity of the operating discipline that the previous occupant of the seat had built up over a decade or more.

In stable times, this distinction is largely invisible. The replacement, even if their judgement differs significantly from the predecessor's, has time to gradually shift the institution toward their own equilibrium. The world is forgiving. Markets give a new chief executive eighteen months. The senior team adapts. The institution drifts, slowly, in a direction the predecessor would not have chosen, but in a direction that is at least coherent with the new leader's actual judgement.

In a succession decade, this is not what happens. The number of institutions undergoing simultaneous transitions overwhelms the system's capacity to absorb the drift. Markets, regulators, and counterparties cannot extend eighteen-month grace periods to every principal at once. The senior teams adapting to new leaders are themselves often new, because cohort transitions cascade. The result is not gradual repositioning but compounded uncertainty, institutions whose operating discipline has been quietly displaced, attempting to make consequential decisions in an environment that has stopped being patient.

The cost of this is not catastrophe. It is erosion. Institutions that were sharp become merely competent. Institutions that were competent become merely functional. Institutions that were already strained begin to fail quietly, gradually, in ways that are not attributed to succession at all because no single moment of failure can be pointed to.

This is the institutional risk profile of the coming decade. It is not the risk of any single succession going wrong. It is the cumulative risk of many successions going only mostly right, simultaneously, in an environment that has stopped being forgiving.

III. The thing successors do not inherit

Every successor inherits the same things: the title, the office, the staff, the salary, the legal authority. They inherit the institution's strategy documents, its board minutes, its shareholder commitments, its regulatory positioning. They inherit a calendar of obligations and a phone with the right numbers in it.

What they do not inherit, in any reliable form, is the operating discipline of the person who held the position before them.

This is a simpler claim than it sounds, and worth being precise about. The operating discipline of a principal, the actual specific way they ran their institution, consists of patterns that are largely undocumented and, in many cases, undocumentable through ordinary means. It is the way they weighed reputational risk against commercial opportunity. The kinds of meetings they took personally and the kinds they delegated. The tone they used in regulator interactions versus client interactions versus internal interactions. The things they would refuse to sign, the things they would sign reluctantly, the things they would sign with confidence. The way they reacted to their first piece of bad news on a Monday morning. The instinct that told them when a deal was wrong even when the analysis said it was right. The unspoken rules of when to consult their senior team and when to overrule them. The hundred small habits of judgement that, taken together, were what their institution actually ran on.

None of this is in the strategy document. None of it is in the board minutes. None of it is in the handover memo. It is, in most institutions, captured nowhere, and yet it is the thing that, in the principal's actual exercise of their role, mattered most.

This is the failure mode of replacement plans. They prepare for the transition of the role and ignore the transition of the discipline. The successor inherits the chair and learns, gradually, to operate from their own discipline rather than the predecessor's. The institution adapts. The world moves on. The thing that made the institution distinctive, the thirty years of accumulated judgement that lived in the predecessor's head, is gradually, quietly, and irreversibly lost.

This is what we mean when we speak of legacies that evaporate. The institutions whose founders the world remembers are not the ones whose founders were necessarily the most accomplished. They are the ones whose institutions did the unusual, expensive, and difficult work of preserving the operating discipline rather than just the role. The ones it loses are the ones for whom the work was never done.

IV. Why the work has historically been so rarely done

If preserving the operating discipline of a principal is so consequential, the obvious question is why so few institutions actually do it.

The answer is that it has, until quite recently, been close to impossible.

The traditional instruments for preserving institutional knowledge are documentary. Memoirs are written, letters preserved, board minutes archived. Some leaders go further, the most disciplined produce extensive private journals, dictate retrospective reflections, sit for oral history interviews. A handful of unusually self-aware principals have, over the years, attempted to write down the operating principles they actually applied, in the form of memos to successors or unpublished manuscripts.

All of this captures, at most, perhaps fifteen per cent of the actual operating discipline. The reason is structural: most of what a principal does is patterned, not stated. The principal cannot write down what they do not consciously know they do. And the discipline, being patterned, is invisible to introspection. It is much easier for a successor to absorb the discipline by operating alongside the predecessor for a period of years than by reading anything the predecessor produced.

Even apprenticeship is a partial solution. A successor who has shadowed their predecessor for five years has absorbed only what they have witnessed in that window. They have not seen how their predecessor handled crises that did not occur in those five years. They have not internalised the trade-offs the predecessor made before they arrived. They have not been present for the small daily judgements that, taken together, constitute the discipline. Apprenticeship transmits, perhaps, forty per cent. The rest is still lost.

This is the structural reason institutional legacies have, throughout history, been mostly partial. The transmission instruments have been inadequate to the task. The result has been that some institutions retain perhaps half of their founder's discipline; most retain rather less; a few retain almost none. This is not a failure of intent. It is a failure of capability.

V. What has changed, and what it makes possible

The capability has changed, and the change is recent.

For the first time in institutional history, it is now possible to capture the operating discipline of a principal at a fidelity dramatically higher than memoirs, archives, or apprenticeship ever achieved. The combination of structured elicitation interviews conducted by trained specialists, comprehensive ingestion of a principal's decision archive, large language models calibrated against the principal's actual reasoning patterns, and continuous refinement against held-out historical decisions, taken together, these techniques can capture not all but considerably more than half of what the traditional instruments captured.

The number is worth being honest about. Properly engineered, a Digital Human Twin operating at the principal-grade standard now reaches measurable directional alignment with the principal's actual decisions in the high eighties to low nineties, which is the range our internal calibration has consistently demonstrated. This is dramatically below one-hundred-per-cent fidelity. It is dramatically above what any previous transmission instrument has achieved. And critically, the gap between current fidelity and theoretical-maximum fidelity is closing rapidly, while the gap between memoir-and-apprenticeship fidelity and theoretical-maximum has been constant for centuries.

This shifts the strategic question for institutions facing succession.

Until very recently, the operating discipline of the principal was effectively non-transmissible at scale. Institutions could only hope that the successor's own discipline would, given time, settle into something coherent. Now, the operating discipline of a long-serving principal can be substantially captured before they depart, calibrated against their actual decisions, governed by their authored charter, and made available to their successors and their institution as an explicit asset.

This does not replace the successor. It does not aspire to. It provides the successor and the institution with continuous access to the predecessor's actual operating discipline as a reference and a check, in the precise moments when access matters most: the early decisions of the new tenure, when the institution is still being calibrated to the new leader; the moments of crisis, when historical precedent within the institution is the most reliable guide; the long, accumulating judgements about people, partnerships, and trade-offs where the institution's accumulated wisdom should be in conversation with the successor's new perspective.

This is, in our view, the single most consequential institutional capability development of the coming decade. It does not solve succession. It transforms what is possible to preserve through it.

VI. The institutional implication

If this is correct, and we believe it is, having spent six years engineering the discipline, then the institutions that will compound their advantage during the succession decade are those that begin the work of capture before the succession is in motion, not after.

This is a non-trivial requirement. It means that an institution facing a succession in 2030 should be doing the capture work in 2026 or 2027, while the principal is still in office, fully engaged, and able to participate in the calibration. It means that the principal must be willing to spend significant time on the project, typically eight to twenty hours of structured interviews, and to authorise the necessary archival access. It means the institution must be willing to invest in the work as a strategic asset rather than a vanity project.

Most institutions, today, are doing none of this. They are operating on replacement plans, treating succession as a matter of the chair rather than the discipline. They are confident that the documentation they have is sufficient. They are wrong, but they will only discover they are wrong eighteen to thirty-six months after the transition, by which point recovery is no longer available.

A small number of institutions, the ones we have the privilege of working with, have understood this and are doing the work. They will, in our view, emerge from the succession decade meaningfully stronger than their peers. The advantage will not be visible immediately. It will compound over the years following the transition, as the institution operates from a continuous, calibrated record of its predecessor's discipline rather than from the gradual reconstruction the successor would otherwise have to perform alone.

VII. The wider question

We have written this essay specifically about institutions, because that is what Columbus knows. But the underlying question is broader, and it is worth ending with.

Civilisation has always faced the problem of how to transmit hard-won judgement across generational boundaries. Almost every cultural innovation of the last three thousand years, written language, formal education, religious tradition, codified law, the apprenticeship system and the corporation as a legal person, has been, in part, an answer to this problem. None of the answers has been entirely satisfactory. The judgement of one generation has always been, mostly, lost to the next.

What is changing now is not that this problem is being solved. It is not. What is changing is that the fidelity ceiling on transmission, which has been roughly stable since the invention of writing, is rising for the first time in millennia. The capability to preserve the operating discipline of an individual at high fidelity, governed and revocable, available to successors and institutions as a continuous reference rather than a dim historical record, this is genuinely new. It will, over the coming decades, change how institutions think about the people who lead them, and how leaders think about their own legacies.

The succession decade is the first test of this capability. The institutions that take it seriously will be the ones whose figures the next century remembers. The institutions that do not will continue to operate on the assumption that succession is a matter of the chair, and will discover, as they have always discovered, that it was actually a matter of the discipline, and the discipline left when the principal did.

It does not have to.

That, in the end, is the argument of this essay.

— The Columbus Editorial Board