Institutions that outlive their founders

A great many African organisations — public, private, philanthropic — are running on a single person's authority and calling it governance. The board exists. The charter exists. The decisions still route through one office.

The test is simple and rarely applied: describe, in writing, what happens to the three most consequential decisions of the next year if the founder is unavailable for six months. If the honest answer is that they wait, the institution has not been built yet.

Succession is usually discussed as a personnel matter. It is really a design matter. Delegated authority has to be exercised before it is needed, or it is theatre — a policy nobody has ever tested.

Three things move an organisation off founder dependence faster than any restructuring: decision rights written down at the level of specific amounts and specific approvals; a genuine number two who is publicly allowed to be wrong in front of the board; and a habit of documenting reasoning, not just outcomes, so that a successor inherits judgement rather than a list.

The reward is not tidiness. It is durability — the difference between a body of work and a career.

Every institution I have advised that survived a hard transition had done this boring work years earlier. Every one that did not, did not.