Succession is not a moment: it's an evolution

A practice that wants to evolve and outlive its founders must both arrange succession and maintain core values. For best results, start long before you think you need to.

How does an architecture practice evolve, especially in times of uncertainty and disruption? Is evolution a strategic journey or a big opportunistic adventure? In this series, published in RIBA Journal over the Summer of 2020, Emma Keyte and I discover how taking full advantage of each threshold met along the way can help to set a practice’s trajectory towards the next. Our first two articles looked at how practices emerge, and then how they stay relevant as they mature. This piece explores what happens as practices evolve further and new generations of leadership join – or even replace – the founders. Can that original spirit and energy be preserved even when the names on the letterhead change?

Read the rest of the article co-researched and co-written by regular collaborator and published in RIBA Journal here

Many thanks to contributors: Stiff + Trevillion, Hawkins\Brown, Apt, Jestico + Whiles, Buckley Gray Yeoman, Grimshaw, Arup and to McCloy Muchemwa who illustrated the series of articles for us.