Most Boards can name a successor. Far fewer have tested one.

By Rebecca Perrone, MAICD, Managing Director, Brooker Consulting

29 September 2026

From the Search Room

Ask a Board who would step up if the CEO left tomorrow, and most can give you a name within thirty seconds. Ask when that person was last tested against real pressure, not a performance review, actual pressure, and the room usually goes quiet.

What actually happens

A name gets attached to succession risk early, often the strongest internal executive at the time the question first comes up, and the Board treats the risk as managed from that point on. The name gets restated at each governance cycle. Nobody revisits whether it still holds.

The data backs up how common this is. AICD’s reporting this month on Australian succession practice cites BoardOutlook’s Q2 2025 Board Performance Market Insights survey of more than a thousand directors globally: less than one in five boards said they were confident in their organisation’s internal CEO candidates, only 20% rated their board’s oversight of succession planning as a strength, and just 18% said they had strong visibility of their own talent pipeline. Of every governance capability the survey measured, succession and talent came in lowest. Linking remuneration to strategy, a much narrower and more mechanical task, came in highest.

A fair defence

Naming a successor early isn’t wrong. It gives the Board a plan, it gives the candidate a signal, and it gives everyone a story to tell if the question ever gets asked in a crisis. Revisiting it constantly would also be its own problem, unsettling for the person named and exhausting for the Board.

Where it stops working

The name becomes a substitute for readiness rather than evidence of it. Two years can pass between a candidate being named and a candidate actually being needed, and in that time the mandate the organisation needs almost always shifts: a merger, a funding change, a regulatory shift, a different market. Nobody goes back and asks whether the person named two years ago is still the right answer to today’s version of the question.

The ASX Corporate Governance Principles have required boards to have succession plans in place since 2019. Having a plan and having tested readiness are not the same requirement, and the gap between them is exactly where the risk sits. A name on a slide satisfies the first. It says nothing about the second.

What the strongest Boards do differently

They separate the naming conversation from the readiness conversation, and treat readiness as something that has to be demonstrated, not assumed. That usually means giving the named successor a genuinely stretching assignment, a board presentation under real scrutiny, a crisis simulation, something the Board hasn’t already watched them do well, rather than reviewing the same familiar strengths that got them named in the first place.

They also revisit the name itself on a fixed cycle, independent of whether anything has obviously changed, because the mandate drifting quietly is exactly the kind of change nobody notices until the moment it matters.

One move worth trying

At the next governance cycle, before the succession discussion starts, ask one question first: what would this role need to deliver in the next eighteen months, and does the named successor’s experience actually cover that? Only then look at the name again. If the answer requires real thought, the plan was resting on the name, not on readiness.

A closing thought

A named successor tells a Board it has an answer. It doesn’t tell a Board the answer still fits the question. Those are two different pieces of comfort, and it’s worth knowing which one you actually have.

Brooker Consulting works with Boards on CEO appointments, including interim and interim-to-permanent transitions.

If this piece was useful, I would welcome a conversation.

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