Triggers, not dates

The obstacle to succession planning in most families is not the plan. It is that any attempt to open the subject is read, by the person currently leading, as a request that they step aside. So the conversation happens in pairs, out of the room, with that person absent, and nothing is ever agreed.

Triggers change what is being discussed. Rather than naming a date or a successor, the family agrees the events: an age at which the leader steps back from executive duties, a health event that hands authority to a named deputy for a defined period, a minimum shadow period before any handover, and a review of all three every second year.

None of those is a decision about a person, which is why a family can settle them years before the choice has to be made, and why the person currently leading is usually the right one to propose them.

The interim arrangement is the part most often left out and the part most often needed. A family that has no second name discovers it during the months when it has no first one, and the months are counted in double figures more often than not.