ABSTRACT
This chapter describes the author's lived experience as a succession practitioner. It explores succession's broader contexts and its instrumental technocratic models.The chapter outlines an existential model and shows how it cohabits with the instrumental technocratic. It provides the space in which autoethnographic narrative and existentialism intersect. The intersection comes to life through what Holman Jones see as the compelling arguments for autoethnography, which include "working from insider knowledge". The chapter offers a way of working through disruption as the basis of succession planning for clients, and a way of working through disruption for practitioners who are engaged in succession planning.It demonstrates that instrumental forms of reasoning have dominated the succession literature.The prevailing focus in this literature is on legal, accounting, and organizational arrangements, and on concepts including agency theory, stakeholder theory, and the resource-based view of the firm.
