By Dirk Jonker, Founder & CEO of Crunchr
Succession planning has changed shape four times in my career. Most companies are still running an early version of it.
My own start was around 2015. The goal was simple. Make the annual succession cycle less painful by taking the manual work out of it. I was doing this at AkzoNobel, and back then the whole process lived in PowerPoint.
Every slide held a critical position with its successors lined up underneath. Someone in HR pulled the names together, dropped them onto the slides, and ran a bit of analytics on the side. How many positions are in scope. How many have a successor ready for the short term. What the bench strength looks like across the business. None of that was hard work, but all of it was slow, and it had to be redone every time something moved.
It mostly held together until the review meeting. The executive committee would sit down, look at a plan, and change it on the spot. One change to one person could ripple through several plans, because the same names appear in more than one place. If HR put the deck on screen before catching that last round of edits, the slides were wrong and the metrics behind them were wrong too. Everyone in the room could see it. That is a bad place to be when you only get the executive committee’s attention once a year.
So I automated it. That was the first real shift. We built a set of Excel macros that connected to SuccessFactors, pulled the data, and generated the slides inside Excel. Then it printed them straight to PDF, with the logos, the templates, the headers and footers all in place. Nobody who saw the output could tell it had never been a PowerPoint. The slides matched the data, and when the data changed, the slides changed with it. That was the second generation, and the manual work was gone.
The third generation came out of the work we did with Arcadis. They had a view I still believe in. Succession planning is not only about covering risk. It is also about development. If you have a strong group of top potentials, you want to know how many of them actually show up in a succession plan, and whether they are being set up for the long term. That turned succession from a defensive exercise into a development one, and it changed the questions we asked of the data.
From there the proposition grew. More metrics, more insight, a connection to predictive internal mobility, so you could see who was likely to move and where, not just who was named on a slide. The version I remember most started as a hackathon at Crunchr, where we visualized succession plans as networks. We took it to HR Tech in October 2018 and let people try it. You put on an Oculus Rift headset and walked through the plans in virtual reality. Grab a node with the controllers, see who the person is, and pull them toward you. The more the rest of the network moved with them, the more pivotal that person was to the whole structure. It showed HR something they had never been able to see in a flat report, and it got them onto the main stage. Executives pay attention to three things in HR: engagement, succession, and pay. This put succession in front of them in a way they remembered.
Photos: Part of the Crunchr Team trying out succession planning in virtual reality at HR Tech, Oct 2018.
Both companies where this work began, AkzoNobel and Arcadis, are still Crunchr customers today. That tells you something. The thinking held up even as the tools changed underneath it.
That brings me to now, and to the problem none of the first three generations solved. Timing.
Succession season runs in Q3 and Q4 for most companies, and it takes months. Then the plan goes in a drawer. When you open it again the next year, one of two things happens. You look at a name and wonder what you were thinking putting that person on the bench. Or you find someone who would have been perfect, except they left the company eight months ago. The plan was a snapshot, and the snapshot got old. The work was real, but its shelf life was short.
The fourth generation fixes the timing. It is continuous and real time.
In Crunchr, succession sits inside the analytics dashboards HR already uses every day. The metrics are out of the box, and a succession monitor runs against them all the time. You do not wait for the year-end review to find a gap. You set alerts, and the gap finds you. A successor leaves, a critical role opens, a bench drops below where it should be, and you hear about it the week it happens, not next October.
But dashboards are only part of the picture. As succession planning becomes continuous, new ways of visualizing succession data start to reveal risks and opportunities that are almost impossible to spot in spreadsheets or static reports. One example is the succession network below. Instead of looking at succession plans one by one, it shows how they connect across the organization.
The dense hubs are people who show up on many plans at once, which is either concentration risk or a manager nominating the same safe name for every role. Follow the arrows and you see succession chains, where the person backfilling one role is themselves the backfill for another, so one move triggers three. Around the edges sit the isolated dots: top potentials nobody has nominated, and roles with no candidate attached. And the nodes that bridge separate clusters are your pivotal people, the ones whose exit does not break one plan but several.Another example looks at succession through the lens of mobility.
This is what happens if every succession plan actually plays out: each ribbon is a person moving from one country to another to fill a role. Hover any flow and you see the predicted international mobility hiding inside your plans, like the two people slated to move from Canada to Hong Kong. Switch the view to function and the same picture tells you whether leaders are crossing between commercial, operations and finance, which is how you build a bench that has seen more than one part of the business. And the thickness of the outbound bars versus the inbound ones tells you who your talent providers are and who your talent consumers are, in other words which leaders are willing to let their best people go and grow somewhere else.
The network visualization also taught us something that changed how we count. Companies carry a lot of double and triple listings. The same person is named as successor by several managers. Everyone walks away believing they have cover, when they are all relying on one individual. So we separate listed successors from available successors, live. If two managers have the same person on their bench, that person counts as one listed and 0.5 available. The number on the screen finally matches reality, and the false comfort goes away.
The other reason this holds up is position management. Crunchr supports it fully, and succession analytics are far more stable because of it. What you actually want to track is whether a person is a credible successor for a position, within a given time frame. A lot of systems are not built that way. They tie the successor to the person, not the role. So when person A is the named successor to person B, and person B moves from the US to Asia and from HR to Finance, the whole bench moves along with them. You end up with finance successors sitting against an Asia role nobody planned for. That was never realistic. Tie succession to positions, and the plan stays honest as people move.
Succession planning was also the subject of my very first LinkedIn article, years ago. The topic has stayed with me the whole way through, and it keeps moving.
So that is the path. From PowerPoint, to Excel-generated slides, to development and risk together with the analytics to back it, and now to succession that runs continuously, counts honestly, and holds its shape as the organization changes.
Fourth-generation succession planning is here. The drawer can stay shut.
Curious what continuous succession planning looks like in practice? Find out how Crunchr supports succession planning as part of everyday workforce analytics.
Fourth-generation succession planning replaces annual succession cycles with continuous monitoring. Instead of reviewing succession plans once a year, organizations continuously monitor succession risk, receive alerts when coverage changes, and keep succession data aligned with the current organization.
Traditional succession plans are snapshots created during an annual planning cycle. Employees change roles, leave the company, or develop new skills throughout the year, causing succession plans to become inaccurate long before the next review.
Listed successors are everyone named in succession plans. Available successors account for situations where the same person has been nominated for multiple critical positions. Measuring available successors provides a more realistic picture of succession coverage.
Position-based succession planning ensures succession plans remain valid when employees change roles. If succession is tied to individuals instead of positions, organizational moves can unintentionally move succession plans with them, creating inaccurate coverage.
Continuous succession planning identifies changes as they happen, such as successors leaving the company, critical vacancies opening, or bench strength declining. This allows organizations to address succession risks before annual review cycles.
Key succession planning metrics include:– Succession coverage for critical positions– Bench strength– Ready-now and ready-later successors– Available successors versus listed successors– Critical roles without successors– Position-based succession coverage– Internal mobility