Firm Design Congruence
When succession stops being aspirational
What should outlast the founding partnership? The answer becomes more pressing as a firm promises continuity across generations. Succession planning turns that commitment into practical questions about people and authority.
What this check compares
This check reads the firm's declared lifecycle stage against the succession structure it has in place, and asks whether the second fits the stage the firm has declared.
The expectation genuinely differs by stage, and it is the only place in this engine where that is true. A Conviction-stage firm is not expected to have formal succession structures, under this model. That is not advice to postpone planning. A Cadence-stage firm is expected to have begun the work, as the operating structure develops. A Continuity-stage firm is expected to have formalized it, because a firm whose defining advantage is durability across partner generations depends on that transition working.
The one check that reads lifecycle
Ten of the eleven congruence checks apply the same structural relationship across lifecycle stages. Succession is the exception: its expectations change with the declared stage. This is a choice in the methodology, not a claim that every other aspect of a firm stays the same as it grows.
The practical question is what the firm is asking people to rely on. A business built around founding partners makes a different commitment from one promising continuity across generations. Review the succession arrangements against that commitment.
What else the check looks at
Alongside the succession structure itself, the check reads two related commitments: whether the firm has a documented promotion path, and whether next-generation stewards have been identified. These can be surfaced as separate tensions in their own right rather than folded into the main outcome, because they are separately actionable. A firm can have a succession document and no identified successors, which is a different problem from having neither.
Both are also the kind of work that is easy to defer indefinitely, since neither has a deadline until the moment it has a very short one. Surfacing them separately is a way of putting them on the page while they are still cheap to address.
What this check does not say
The check does not say a firm should be at a different lifecycle stage. Lifecycle is self-classified: the General Partner declares it, confirms it, and the platform never transitions a firm on its own. A tension here says the succession structure and the declared stage do not match, and a firm that concludes it has classified itself one stage ahead of where it actually operates has resolved the tension just as legitimately as one that starts the succession work.
The check reads declared structure, not the quality or the fairness of it. A documented succession plan that the partnership does not believe in reads the same way here as one everybody has signed up to. That distinction is real and it is not one a configuration can express.