One of our suspicions about succession planning is that a reason it often doesn’t go so well is that successful CEOs (or other leaders, if you’re succession planning in other parts of the organization) may not be able to communicate why what they do works so well. Ryan equated it to trying to recreate one of your mother-in-law’s famous recipes. While she may pass along the ingredients and instructions, it never comes out quite the same, does it?

The upshot of that is that you may not be able to capture the secret sauce. But what you can do is try to capture as much as possible what you know about, what you do in, and how you think about your business ​​in order to weave it into the fabric of that business so that your influence lasts forever. 

There’s a lot of work that has to be done in getting ready to transition leadership that revolves around documentation – everything from housekeeping and passwords to key relationships, core practices, and the formulae your business is based on. There are a lot of ways to capture and transmit this information, but it’s worth thinking specifically about what it’s hardest for you to articulate about what you do, what you know, and how you go about things. We’ve all found ourselves at one time or another struggling to transmit that knowledge and expertise or to receive and understand it, and what the piece ultimately concludes is that to transmit and receive this type of expertise requires long-term apprenticeship and frequent post-mortems. 

In other words, keeping any knowledge in-house is labor intensive, but passing down the deep knowledge is even harder – and takes real relationships and trust, a culture of sharing, learning, and transmitting, a concerted effort to get the stuff that only lives in your brain out and to another brain, and, in terms of succession planning and leadership transfer, starting early. 

One method for refining your capabilities as a teacher and communicator – and making sure you’re passing along the best guide to your responsibilities you can? A version of the Feynman technique. 

1. Write down everything you know about your job. 

2. Use that as the basis to train new hires. 

3. What questions are they left with? Use those gaps to review and refine your documentation.

4. Test and repeat and test and repeat until you’re sure the documentation you’re leaving reflects the work you actually do.

But, the other thing about identifying a successor is that you and the business may actually want a different secret sauce. Take the Steve Jobs-Tim Cook transition. Jobs's last advice to Cook was to do what was right, not what Jobs would do, and Cook listened. While universal acclaim for Cook has not materialized, there’s a significant case to be made that while Apple seems less “magical” today under his leadership, it’s “more predictable” and “a whole lot more valuable” (current market volatility, of course, aside).

So, does whoever is going to step up need to be able to keep the business going? Yes. And would it be nice to keep the magic stirring in the secret sauce? Also yes. But having the humility to recognize your own weaknesses and blind spots (if you’re the incumbent) or the foresight to think through the skills a successor could bring to the table that complement the organization’s success (if you’re involved in the process) could be the key to keeping things special.