Every time I take on a new succession-planning project I stop and think about the best ways to share what I have learned. While some may approach succession as if it lends itself to a pre-planned set of procedures, I don't view it that way.  Succession is one of those extremely personal things, and by 'personal' I mean succession is wrapped up in the needs of more than one person. And, we have to face the fact – people’s needs can be multi-faceted, nuanced and complex. 

I found myself comparing success to sports. I concluded it would definitely fall in the zone of some sort of endurance competition…an endurance competition involving a team…perhaps, an amazing race. As I was thinking along that direction I thought of bicycle racing teams like the Tour de France. A big problem with that analogy is only one person gets to win the bicycle race.  In successful succession projects all the players on the team have to win. Another big problem is, if it's done right succession planning really isn’t a race at all. It isn't a contest that lends itself to stopwatches or time-clocks. In fact, when it is run against time-clocks succession falls short of full success, creating at best some winners but also some losers.

After spending some time thinking about the various sports analogies, I decided there is no real-life sport that can be used to explain business succession. The closest I could do was to create a new sport which would go like this: 

• there's only one team playing it, so external competition is not a key factor – on the other hand, internal communication is a critical factor; 
• every player on the team takes turn piggybacking other players, carrying them from time to time for various distances, exerting strength to offset others’ weaknesses;
• all of the players must cross the transition line as a close-knit group, within arms-length of one another; and,
• the final requirement is after the transition line has been passed everyone on the team feels good about themselves and each of the other players on the team.

Doesn’t that sound like an interesting sport...a wonderful thing to experience!