Most boards discover they need a succession plan at the exact moment it is too late to build one properly, when a chair announces they are stepping down at the next AGM, or worse, when a director's sudden illness or departure leaves a genuine gap with no notice at all. BoardSource's Leading with Intent research, a large-scale study of American nonprofit board practice, found that only around 27 per cent of nonprofits surveyed had a written succession plan in place. There is no reason to think Australian associations look meaningfully different.
Two different problems, often confused as one
Succession planning genuinely covers two distinct scenarios, and boards that treat them as a single exercise usually end up with a document that serves neither well. Emergency succession addresses the immediate question: if the chair or chief executive became unable to serve tomorrow, through illness, sudden departure, or any other cause, who has the authority to act, sign, and communicate on the organisation's behalf in the interim? This needs no strategic retreat or extended process. It needs a short, clear, current document naming who steps in, what authority they hold, and how the organisation communicates the change, reviewed at least annually regardless of whether anything appears imminent.
Strategic succession is a different, longer horizon exercise: the deliberate development of the board's own bench strength over time, so that when a planned transition genuinely does arrive, whether a chair's term limit, discussed later in this quarter, or a long-serving director's natural rotation off the board, the organisation already has people ready rather than starting the search from nothing.
A board with only an emergency plan is prepared for a crisis but not for growth. A board with only a strategic development plan is prepared for growth but exposed if the crisis arrives first. Both are needed, and they are not the same document.
Why the chair transition deserves specific attention
The AICD's own guidance on board succession planning treats the chair's role as a specific category worth its own deliberate plan, distinct from general director renewal. This is sound practice for associations too. A chair transition handled badly, an outgoing chair pressured into staying an additional term because no successor was developed, or a new chair thrown into the role with no preparation, creates exactly the kind of governance instability this series has warned against elsewhere: decisions made under pressure rather than through deliberate process. A genuine chair succession approach identifies a credible pathway well before the transition is needed, whether that is a deputy chair role structured explicitly as preparation for the chairship, or a more informal but still deliberate mentoring relationship between the current chair and likely successors on the board.
Building bench strength without it becoming a crowning
There is a genuine tension worth naming here. Strategic succession planning, done carelessly, can shade into anointing a successor before anyone else has a genuine chance to be considered, which sits uncomfortably against the member-elected structures many associations rely on and the fiduciary independence discussed earlier in this quarter. The way through this tension is process, not secrecy. Bench strength development should mean genuinely broadening the pool of board members with governance experience, committee leadership exposure, and induction into the chair's responsibilities, not narrowing the field to a single anointed heir before an election or appointment process has genuinely run.
- Maintain a current, short emergency succession document naming interim authority for the chair and chief executive roles, reviewed at least annually.
- Treat chair succession as its own deliberate strategic exercise, not folded into general director succession, given the disproportionate governance risk a poorly handled chair transition creates.
- Build bench strength broadly, through committee leadership rotation and genuine governance exposure for multiple board members, rather than narrowing to a single successor before any election process runs.
- Connect succession planning explicitly to the skills matrix discussed earlier in this quarter, so that recruitment and development target the organisation's actual current and anticipated gaps.
Succession planning done well is invisible in exactly the way good governance usually is. Nobody notices a transition that goes smoothly. Everybody notices the one that does not. The difference between the two is rarely luck. It is almost always whether the plan existed before it was needed.
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Until next week,
Annie