Part IV - Passing the Fisherman's Ring: Knowledge Transfer in Leadership Transitions
If you've been following this series on succession planning through the lens of the papal conclave, you might have noticed a glaring omission. We've explored the conclave's structure, its political dynamics, and its gender limitations. But we haven't yet addressed what happens after the white smoke appears – the critical process of knowledge transfer between outgoing and incoming leaders.
This isn't an accidental oversight. It reflects a fascinating reality about traditional papal transitions: they typically involved minimal knowledge transfer. When a pope died (the historical norm before Benedict XVI's 2013 resignation), he took his institutional knowledge, relationship insights, and operational wisdom to the grave. The new pope stepped into leadership with virtually no handover process beyond written records and the collective memory of the Curia (more later on this).
Rather than a model to emulate, this represents one of the conclave system's greatest weaknesses – one dramatically illustrated in the 2019 film "The Two Popes," which imagines the conversations between Benedict XVI and his eventual successor, Francis.
So let's explore the crucial yet often neglected dimension of succession planning: the transfer of knowledge, relationships, and institutional memory between departing and incoming leaders.
The Fisherman's Ring: Symbol of a Broken Transfer Process
In papal transitions, the ceremonial destruction of the previous pope's ring – the "Fisherman's Ring" that served as his personal seal – symbolizes a clean break between pontificates. This dramatic act communicates unmistakable transfer of authority but also represents an institutional commitment to discontinuity rather than knowledge preservation. In the movie Conclave, someone is shown removing the top section of the pope’s ring, using some tools to detach what looks like a seal from the ring itself.
Most organizations don't literally destroy symbols of previous leadership, but many create similarly abrupt transitions. The departing CEO cleans out her office on Friday; the new one arrives Monday morning. The founder makes a dramatic farewell speech and disappears from the organization entirely. The executive director hands over keys without sharing the unwritten knowledge that makes those keys useful.
These ceremonial breaks create clear transitions of authority but often destroy valuable institutional knowledge in the process. The new leader spends months or years rediscovering information the previous leader already knew – about stakeholder relationships, operational quirks, historical context for current challenges, unwritten agreements, and cultural nuances.
In "The Two Popes," the fictional conversations between Benedict and Francis represent a radical departure from tradition – an unprecedented knowledge transfer between papal predecessors and successors. Their dialogue, while imagined by screenwriter Anthony McCarten, illustrates the profound and beautiful value of direct communication between outgoing and incoming leaders.
What if we designed succession processes with intentional knowledge transfer at their center rather than treating it as an afterthought? What if transitions prioritized preservation of critical institutional memory alongside clear transfer of authority?
The Vatican's Staff Continuity: An Unintentional Solution
While the papal conclave tradition did not create formal knowledge transfer between popes, it developed an alternative mechanism for preserving institutional memory: extraordinary staff continuity.
The Roman Curia – the Vatican's administrative apparatus – maintains remarkable stability through papal transitions. Key officials often serve multiple popes, providing operational continuity even when top leadership changes. This creates an institutional memory that transcends individual pontificates.
Many organizations achieve similar continuity through long-tenured staff who bridge leadership transitions. The executive assistant who's served three CEOs. The finance director who remembers why that unusual accounting practice was implemented fifteen years ago. The program manager who maintains relationships with key community partners across multiple leadership changes.
These continuity carriers play a vital role in succession, but relying on them exclusively creates significant vulnerabilities. Critical knowledge becomes concentrated in a few individuals. Institutional memory becomes fragmented and selective. Power dynamics emerge that can undermine new leadership if not carefully managed.
In "The Two Popes," we see both the value and limitation of staff continuity. Benedict's secretary provides continuity between pontificates, but the film suggests that direct dialogue between predecessor and successor provides insights that no intermediary could convey.
Effective succession planning acknowledges the value of staff continuity while creating more intentional, comprehensive knowledge transfer processes.
What Gets Lost in Transition: Categories of Critical Knowledge
When organizations fail to create intentional knowledge transfer processes, they risk losing several distinct categories of critical information:
Relationship Intelligence The departing leader's understanding of key stakeholder dynamics, personal preferences, historical interactions, unspoken expectations, and relationship vulnerabilities rarely exists in written form. A new leader without this knowledge can inadvertently damage crucial relationships through innocent missteps.
Decision Context The departing leader knows not just what decisions were made, but why they were made, what alternatives were considered, what constraints shaped the choices, and what compromises were necessary. This contextual understanding helps new leaders avoid reopening settled issues or repeating unsuccessful approaches.
Informal Agreements Organizations operate through countless unwritten understandings – with funders, partners, staff, board members, and community stakeholders. Many of these arrangements exist nowhere except in the departing leader's memory. Without transfer of this knowledge, new leaders may unwittingly violate expectations they never knew existed.
Organizational Culture Nuances The departing leader understands the unspoken cultural norms that shape organizational functioning – which values truly drive decisions versus those merely articulated publicly, how conflict is handled productively, which traditions matter deeply to staff, and how change initiatives have historically succeeded or failed.
Risk Awareness The departing leader knows where the potential disruptioms exist – brewing conflicts, emerging problems, relationship tensions, compliance vulnerabilities, and strategic risks that haven't yet manifested into crises but require careful monitoring.
In the traditional papal transition model, much of this knowledge would be lost entirely. In "The Two Popes," the fictional dialogue between Benedict and Francis explores precisely these categories of understanding – the relationship complexities, contextual insights, and cultural nuances that formal records could never capture.
Effective succession planning creates structured opportunities to transfer each category of knowledge rather than hoping it happens organically or relying entirely on staff continuity.
The Two Popes Model: Direct Dialogue as Knowledge Transfer
"The Two Popes" presents a fascinating thought experiment: What would happen if departing and incoming leaders engaged in extended, honest conversation about the role they're transferring?
The film imagines Benedict and Francis discussing not just theological positions but personal struggles, leadership challenges, institutional threats, and their own doubts and fears. This dialogue – while fictional – illustrates the profound potential of direct communication between predecessors and successors.
“Few organizations create space for this kind of candid exchange. Departing leaders typically provide operational handovers but rarely share their deepest insights about organizational dynamics, their own mistakes, or the personal dimensions of leadership.”
Several factors inhibit this essential dialogue:
Departing leaders fear appearing to meddle or undermining their successors' authority
Incoming leaders worry about seeming unprepared or being unduly influenced
Organizations prioritize clear breaks over messy knowledge transfer processes
Competitive dynamics between predecessors and successors create defensive communication
Time pressures during transitions reduce opportunities for extended dialogue
What if we explicitly designed succession processes to overcome these barriers? What if we normalized honest dialogue between departing and incoming leaders as essential to organizational health rather than as an exceptional circumstance?
Beyond Conversation: Structured Knowledge Transfer Methods
Direct dialogue between predecessors and successors, while valuable, represents just one approach to knowledge transfer. Effective succession planning incorporates multiple methods to ensure comprehensive information sharing:
Documented Brain Dumps Departing leaders can create written or recorded knowledge repositories addressing key relationships, decision contexts, informal agreements, cultural nuances, and risk awareness – information rarely captured in standard documentation.
Shadowing Periods Structured opportunities for incoming leaders to observe their predecessors in action provide contextual understanding impossible to convey through conversation alone. Witnessing how the departing leader navigates relationships, addresses challenges, and embodies organizational culture creates invaluable learning.
Staged Responsibility Transfer Rather than abrupt handovers, phased transitions allow incoming leaders to gradually assume responsibilities with decreasing oversight from predecessors. This creates space for knowledge transfer to occur in context rather than in abstract conversations.
Facilitated Knowledge Extraction Third-party facilitators can sometimes extract information from departing leaders more effectively than direct successors. Skilled interviewers ask questions departing leaders might not anticipate, surface tacit knowledge they don't realize they possess, and create psychological safety for vulnerable sharing. This is one of the elements of service that my team offers, through efficient processes, and it’s extremely effective.
Stakeholder Connection Process Structured introductions to key stakeholders, facilitated by the departing leader, transfer not just contacts but relationship context. These three-way conversations allow for nuanced understanding of relationship dynamics that simple introductions can't provide.
Culture and History Documentation Capturing organizational stories, traditions, and cultural elements in accessible formats preserves institutional memory even when personal knowledge transfer is limited.
The papal succession model historically incorporated none of these practices. "The Two Popes" imagines what might have been possible with just one – direct dialogue between predecessor and successor. Comprehensive succession planning incorporates multiple knowledge transfer methods to ensure critical information survives leadership transitions.
Knowledge Transfer After Difficult Departures
Not all succession occurs under ideal circumstances. Leaders sometimes depart under conflict, health crises, ethical concerns, or other challenging conditions that make comprehensive knowledge transfer difficult or impossible.
The traditional papal succession model actually anticipated this reality better than most modern approaches. By creating systems of distributed knowledge throughout the Curia, maintaining comprehensive documentation, and establishing clear operational protocols, the Vatican created resilience against individual knowledge loss.
Organizations facing difficult transitions can learn from this approach by:
Creating knowledge redundancy before crises occur
Documenting critical information as standard practice rather than scrambling during transitions
Establishing operational systems that don't rely on any single individual's knowledge
Building strong secondary leadership that holds distributed institutional knowledge
Developing relationships with former staff or stakeholders who might provide historical context
Even when direct knowledge transfer from the departing leader isn't possible, organizations can reconstruct critical information through collective memory and distributed knowledge. The conclave model reminds us that succession systems must be resilient against individual knowledge loss rather than assuming ideal transition circumstances.
The Dangers of Knowledge Hoarding
Knowledge transfer requires not just systems and processes but a fundamental willingness to share information – a quality not all departing leaders possess.
Some leaders deliberately hoard knowledge as a source of power and continued relevance. They withhold critical information, maintain exclusive stakeholder relationships, or keep important context hidden from their successors. Sometimes this behavior is conscious; often it's an unconscious response to the psychological challenges of letting go.
“The papal tradition of ring destruction sends a powerful message about the finality of transition – a message some departing leaders need to hear. You are no longer pope. The role has fully transferred to your successor. Your authority has ended.”
Many organizations struggle with leaders who can't accept this finality. The founder who continues answering stakeholder calls after retiring. The former CEO who maintains direct relationships with board members. The departed executive director who second-guesses successor decisions through informal channels.
Effective succession planning must address this psychological dimension of knowledge transfer. It must create processes that encourage generous information sharing while establishing clear boundaries that prevent unhealthy continued involvement.
The Successor's Dilemma: Learning Without Being Captured
Knowledge transfer creates a complementary challenge for incoming leaders: How do you absorb your predecessor's wisdom without becoming captive to their perspective?
New leaders must balance two competing needs: learning critical information from their predecessors while establishing independent authority and perspective. Lean too far toward independence, and you lose valuable institutional knowledge. Lean too far toward continuity, and you sacrifice the fresh thinking that motivated your selection.
In "The Two Popes," Francis navigates this dilemma with remarkable skill. He listens deeply to Benedict's insights while maintaining his distinct vision for the Church's future. He honors his predecessor's knowledge while charting his own course.
Few leadership transitions achieve this delicate balance. Many incoming leaders make one of two mistakes:
The Clean Break Fallacy Some new leaders deliberately avoid learning from predecessors, believing that fresh perspective requires complete disconnection from previous leadership. They unnecessarily reinvent systems, damage key relationships through ignorance, and miss crucial context for current challenges.
The Continuation Trap Others become too dependent on predecessor wisdom, continuing established patterns without critical evaluation. They sacrifice their unique perspective and the opportunity for necessary evolution that leadership transitions should enable.
Effective succession planning creates knowledge transfer processes that support learning without capturing – that preserve essential institutional memory while creating space for new vision and direction.
Staff Experience During Knowledge Transfer: The Forgotten Dimension
While we focus on knowledge transfer between departing and incoming leaders, we often overlook how this process affects the wider organization – particularly staff caught between old and new leadership approaches.
The traditional papal transition model actually excels in this dimension. The Curia's responsibility during conclave and transition periods is clearly defined. Staff roles remain stable while leadership changes. The system acknowledges that organizational continuity depends on staff experience as much as leadership transfer.
Many modern organizations neglect this dimension entirely. They focus exclusively on the transition between leaders without considering how staff navigate the knowledge transfer process. This creates several problems:
Staff waste energy managing conflicting guidance from outgoing and incoming leaders
Critical information held by staff never reaches the new leader because no process exists to facilitate this transfer
Team members feel torn between loyalty to departing leaders and commitment to new direction
Knowledge transfer becomes politicized as staff align with either the past or future
Effective succession planning addresses staff experience explicitly. It creates clear guidance for how team members should navigate the transition period, establishes processes for staff to share knowledge with new leadership, and acknowledges the emotional challenges of shifting loyalties.
Maintaining Institutional Memory Beyond Individual Transitions
The papal succession system's greatest strength may be its approach to institutional memory that transcends individual transitions. Through consistent record-keeping, maintained traditions, and stable operational systems, the Vatican preserves essential knowledge across centuries rather than merely between consecutive leaders.
Most organizations think about knowledge transfer only in terms of immediate succession – getting information from the current leader to the next one. This short-term thinking creates vulnerability to knowledge loss over longer time horizons.
Effective succession planning takes a generational view of institutional memory. It creates systems that preserve essential knowledge across multiple leadership transitions rather than focusing exclusively on immediate handovers.
This might include:
Systematic documentation of key decisions, including context and alternatives considered
Regular capturing of institutional stories and traditions
Creation of accessible archives for future reference
Development of consistent operational systems that new leaders can learn without direct predecessor guidance
Cultivation of organizational historians who maintain broader contextual understanding
The conclave model reminds us that succession planning isn't just about the next leader – it's about institutional continuity across generations.
Creating Your Knowledge Transfer Protocol
As we consider what the papal transition model teaches us – both through its strengths and weaknesses – several principles emerge for effective knowledge transfer in succession planning:
Balance continuity and fresh perspective Create processes that preserve essential institutional knowledge while enabling new leaders to establish independent vision and authority.
Use multiple transfer methods Don't rely exclusively on direct conversation between predecessors and successors. Incorporate documentation, shadowing, staged transitions, facilitated extraction, and stakeholder connections. Another element of this area is to consider recording your documentation in various ways such as recorded video walkthroughs, audio brain dumps, bullet point lists, and more formal SOPs.
Address the psychological dimensions Acknowledge the emotional challenges that affect knowledge sharing for both departing and incoming leaders. Create processes that encourage generosity while establishing clear boundaries.
Consider staff experience Design transition processes that provide clear guidance for team members caught between departing and incoming leadership. Often, simply naming that this tension exists goes a long way.
Take a generational view Build systems that maintain institutional memory across multiple transitions rather than focusing exclusively on immediate handovers.
Create resilience against difficult departures Develop knowledge redundancy, documentation practices, and distributed understanding that protect critical information even when ideal transitions aren't possible.
The papal transition model – especially as reimagined in "The Two Popes" – offers valuable lessons in both what to emulate and what to avoid. Its weaknesses in direct knowledge transfer highlight the importance of intentional processes for information sharing. Its strengths in institutional continuity demonstrate the value of systems that transcend individual leadership tenures.
As you consider your own organization's succession planning, ask yourself: What critical knowledge walks out the door when leaders depart? What systems have you created to preserve essential understanding across transitions? How will your successor know what you know?
In our next article, we'll examine cautionary tales of succession planning gone wrong and what we can learn from these failures.
This is the fourth article in a six-part series examining succession planning through the lens of the papal conclave process. Part I, Part II, Part III. Up next: "When Succession Fails: Cautionary Tales from Conclave to Boardroom” where we will analyze failed succession examples across nonprofits, sports, business, and papal history. This article will also identify common patterns in succession failures, and provide lessons for creating more resilient succession processes.