What succession planning is
Succession planning is identifying the critical roles in an organisation and preparing ready replacements for them before they fall vacant, so that no work stops when a person is absent.
The word “before” is the whole discipline. Everything succession planning does can also be done after a resignation, under time pressure, with the person who held the knowledge already gone. Doing it in advance is not a different activity; it is the same activity performed while the answers are still available.
A critical role is not a senior role
The common confusion is that succession concerns leadership positions alone. The correct test is the effect of the vacancy, not where the role sits in the structure. A sole accountant who knows the whole invoicing cycle, or a technician who alone holds permissions on an operational system, occupies a critical role even though neither is a leadership position.
The practical question is: what stops tomorrow if this person does not turn up for a month? Whatever stops is the definition of critical. This test has the useful property of being answerable by the people who would have to cope, rather than by the organisation chart, and their answer is usually different from the one the chart implies.
There is a second reason the seniority framing does harm. Senior roles are the ones most likely to have a visible deputy and a documented handover already, precisely because their importance is obvious. The roles with no deputy and no documentation are the ones nobody classified as important, which is the same set the effect test is designed to find.
The steps of a plan
- Identify the critical roles using the effect test.
- Determine the skills, permissions and knowledge each of them requires.
- Nominate internal replacements, and assess each one’s readiness: ready now, ready within a year, or needing longer.
- Close the gap through training and gradual delegation, not by announcing the nomination.
- Review the plan periodically, because readiness changes as people and the work change.
Step four is where the plan either transfers something or does not. Announcing a nomination transfers a label. Delegating progressively transfers the capability, and it has the further advantage of testing the assessment in step three against something other than an opinion. A replacement assessed as “ready now” who has never covered the role for a fortnight has been assessed on paper.
Step five is the one that silently lapses. A succession plan is a statement about a set of people at a moment, and both the people and the work move. A plan reviewed once and then relied on for three years is describing an organisation that no longer exists, and it will be discovered to be describing it on the day it is needed.
The part that gets forgotten: undocumented knowledge
The most dangerous thing about a critical role is not the skill but the knowledge that was never written down: passwords, exceptions agreed verbally, the particular way a given supplier has to be handled. A succession plan that does not capture this knowledge transfers the job title without transferring the ability to do the job.
This knowledge has a characteristic that makes it hard to collect: the person holding it usually does not know they hold it. It does not feel like knowledge to them, it feels like how the work is done, so asking “what do you know that nobody else knows” reliably produces the answer “nothing much”. The question that works better is procedural rather than introspective: walk through a month of the role and note every point at which a decision was made that is not written anywhere. Those points are the inventory.
Capturing it is also the part of the plan with a real cost, because it consumes the time of exactly the person whose time is most constrained. That cost is the reason it is deferred, and deferring it is the reason most succession plans transfer a title.
Which of the two makes the plan real
Two candidates have now been named, progressive delegation in step four and the undocumented knowledge above, and they are usually quoted as alternatives. They are not alternatives. One is the mechanism and the other is what the mechanism has to carry: the thing that has to move is the undocumented knowledge, and delegation is the only step in the list capable of moving it.
Putting it that way is what makes the pair testable, because each half fails in a recognisable manner without the other. Delegation that moves only the parts of the role already written down transfers what a handover note would have transferred anyway, which is why a plan can complete step four in full and still fail on the day it is needed. And an attempt to capture the undocumented knowledge in a document, with no period in which the successor actually runs the role, produces a file that reads as though it covers everything and that nobody has ever used to make a decision under pressure. A plan that performs one of the two without the other has performed neither, and it will report itself complete in both cases.
An emergency contact list is not a plan
The object most often presented as a succession plan is a table naming, for each critical role, the person who would cover it. That table is useful and it is not a plan, because it records a decision about who and nothing at all about whether. It survives review comfortably, since the question it answers is the question that gets asked in the meeting, and the readiness behind each name is never the thing on the agenda.
The plan is the readiness assessment in step three and the delegation in step four. The table is what those produce once they exist. Held on its own it is the output without the work, and the two are indistinguishable on paper until the week somebody has to use it.
How it differs from career pathing
Succession starts from the organisation’s need: this is a critical role, so who succeeds the person in it? Career pathing starts from the employee’s ambition: this is a promising employee, so where do they progress to? The two may meet, and they do not necessarily.
Treating them as the same exercise damages both. Succession driven by ambition leaves the critical roles nobody aspires to without any cover at all, and those are frequently the roles the effect test flags first. Career pathing driven by succession tells an employee their future is defined by whichever gap the organisation happens to need filled, which is not a career conversation and will not be received as one.
What the plan needs to be written against
Steps two and three both depend on being able to state what a role requires in terms specific enough to assess somebody against. That is what a competency description provides, and it is why a succession plan built on an organisation without one tends to reduce to a list of names next to a list of roles, with the readiness column filled in from impressions.
The permissions element of step two is usually recoverable from systems rather than from memory, and the role history, qualifications and current responsibilities are recorded in the employee file. The one input that no system holds is the undocumented knowledge, which is the argument for collecting it while the holder is still present rather than at the point where the exit interview is the last opportunity to ask.
A standalone Saudi HR system
One employee file holding the contract, the documents and their expiry dates, the attendance record, leave, salary and end-of-service entitlements. End-of-service, overtime and leave-balance calculations are built into the system.
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