Every theater organization knows it should have a succession plan. Almost none actually do. This isn't laziness or incompetence—it's a complex psychological and structural avoidance that runs deep in our field's culture.

The reluctance makes a perverse kind of sense. Discussing who might replace a beloved artistic director feels like planning a funeral while someone's still healthy. Board members worry about appearing disloyal. Executive leaders fear that acknowledging their own mortality—professional or otherwise—somehow hastens it. And founders? They've often sacrificed everything to build something from nothing. Asking them to contemplate their organization without them touches existential wounds.

Yet the cost of this collective silence is staggering. We've all witnessed it: the sudden departure that sends an organization into crisis, the prolonged leadership vacuum that drains staff morale, the hasty search that produces a poor fit. The artistic and financial damage from unprepared transitions can take a decade to repair—if the institution survives at all. It's time we examined why this essential governance function remains theater's most persistent blind spot.

The term founder syndrome carries negative connotations, but the phenomenon itself is morally neutral. Founders create something from nothing through sheer force of vision and will. The organization literally wouldn't exist without them. This creates a genuine identity question: Is the institution the founder's vision made manifest, or is it an independent entity that happens to have been founded by a particular person?

Both answers can be true, and navigating this paradox requires extraordinary emotional intelligence from everyone involved. Founders often cannot separate their personal identity from institutional identity—and early in an organization's life, this fusion is actually an asset. The problem emerges when the institution matures and needs governance structures that transcend any individual.

Effective transitions require what we might call identity archaeology: excavating which elements of organizational culture flow from the founder's personality versus which reflect durable institutional values. A founder's charismatic fundraising style might be personal. Their commitment to emerging playwrights might be institutional. Distinguishing these matters enormously for what gets preserved.

Boards must resist two opposite temptations. The first is treating the founder as irreplaceable—freezing the organization in amber or making the successor's job impossible. The second is overcorrecting: hiring someone deliberately unlike the founder as if to prove the institution can change, regardless of strategic fit.

The healthiest transitions involve founders in shaping succession criteria while protecting them from the final selection. This preserves their wisdom while preventing the almost irresistible urge to select someone who will continue doing things exactly their way. It's a delicate balance that requires board leadership willing to hold difficult boundaries with respect.

Takeaway

Founder transitions succeed when organizations distinguish between preserving institutional values and preserving one person's style—honoring the founder's contribution while allowing necessary evolution.

Succession planning isn't only about orderly transitions after announced departures. It's about what happens when someone gets hit by the proverbial bus—or receives an unexpected job offer, faces a health crisis, or simply burns out faster than anyone anticipated.

Every organization should maintain what I call minimum viable succession documentation, updated annually regardless of leadership stability. This includes: current job descriptions that actually reflect what leaders do (not the sanitized version), a list of who currently handles which critical relationships (funders, board members, key artists), and at least two people who know every essential password and process.

The psychological barrier here is superstition. Writing down emergency procedures feels like inviting emergency. But this documentation serves another purpose entirely: it forces clarity about how decisions actually get made. Many executive directors discover, while creating succession documents, that they've accumulated responsibilities no one else even knows about. This itself is a governance problem worth surfacing.

Beyond documentation, boards should discuss—at least annually, in executive session—what they would do if the artistic director resigned tomorrow. Not because they expect it, but because having thought through the question once makes crisis response infinitely better. Would they appoint an interim from staff? Hire an interim consultant? Accelerate a search? These conversations take thirty minutes and provide invaluable preparation.

The goal isn't a perfect plan that predicts every scenario. It's organizational muscle memory that prevents panic-driven decisions. When leadership transitions happen unexpectedly, institutions that have practiced thinking about them respond with deliberation rather than desperation.

Takeaway

Emergency succession preparation isn't about predicting departures—it's about building organizational capacity to respond thoughtfully under pressure rather than reactively in crisis.

The most sustainable succession planning happens years before any transition, through deliberate development of internal candidates. This doesn't mean anointing successors prematurely—a practice that creates its own problems. It means building organizational depth so that qualified internal candidates might exist when the moment arrives.

Associate positions serve this function when structured properly. An associate artistic director with real decision-making authority over a portion of programming develops the judgment and relationships that future leadership requires. An associate who merely implements others' decisions learns administration, not leadership. The distinction matters enormously.

Development also means exposure. Future leaders need experience with board relations, fundraising, crisis management, and external partnerships—not just artistic programming. Organizations that shield emerging leaders from these realities produce people who aren't actually ready when transitions occur. Strategic boards ensure promising staff members present at board meetings, cultivate donor relationships, and handle visible external responsibilities.

The boundary question is real: How do you develop people without promising them jobs that may never open, or that may go to external candidates? Transparency helps. Framing development as building general leadership capacity—valuable wherever someone's career leads—rather than as succession positioning creates honest expectations.

External searches remain appropriate and sometimes necessary. But organizations that invest in internal development enter those searches with options. They can genuinely choose the best candidate rather than feeling forced to look outside because no one inside is remotely prepared.

Takeaway

Developing internal candidates isn't about predetermining succession—it's about ensuring your organization has genuine choices when transitions occur, rather than being forced into external searches by default.

The conversation about succession planning requires courage precisely because it surfaces questions organizations prefer to avoid. Who are we without our current leader? Have we built something durable or merely enabled one person's vision? These are uncomfortable but essential inquiries.

The institutions that thrive across generations share a common characteristic: they've learned to hold leadership transitions as natural rather than catastrophic. They honor departing leaders without treating departure as betrayal. They welcome new voices without abandoning institutional memory.

This orientation doesn't happen accidentally. It requires boards willing to raise awkward topics, executives willing to contemplate their own professional mortality, and organizational cultures that separate individual contribution from institutional identity. The work is uncomfortable. The alternative—crisis-driven transitions that damage artists, staff, and communities—is far worse.