Search and selection is an essential part of delivering any effective succession planning programme. As with most management concepts, it is like a neighbouring mountain peak – imperfectly glimpsed from time to time through swirling mists and never exactly where one thought it was.

In most organisations, it veers uneasily between, “It’ll be alright on the night” and Buggins’s turn. To continue, and mix, a metaphor, the organisation which rehearses well and kills Buggins is rare but is moving in the right direction.

Traditionally, search and selection has been about identifying the job within the organisation; the criteria that define success in the job; and the person who best fits the bill. Tradition, unfortunately, rules in too many British institutions. This usually has two results:

• We over-systematise – the true vice anglais;

• We seek comfort in the past and fail to look to the future.

At the top of any organisation the key issues are, more emphatically, not about systemisation. They are about keeping an open mind about the organisation, the job, the person required. And about the political, economic, social and technological context within which the job will operate – all of which are usually beyond the control of any organisation and therefore often ignored.

All this is abstract but translates readily into some general principles – not a system! – which are applicable to practically any organisation:

• Power must not be monolithic. Too much power concentrated in one person – even the Chief Executive – leads to arrogance and carelessness and will often lead to not knowing when to step down – nor will others dare to whisper in the ear of the all powerful.

• There must be a group of differentiated candidates for the top jobs within the organisation – not clones and not a single Crown Prince(ss) - or the organisation locks on to a single model and stagnates;

• The Outsider must always be kept open as a real possibility both as a warning, to prevent complacency, as an answer to an exceptional need which could not have been foreseen, and above all as a catalyst for change.

Having prepared the ground for succession, there is nothing more debilitating than to find it postponed sine die. The players are then as so many Edens to a Churchill or, more likely, will go elsewhere, leaving a pattern laboriously to be rebuilt. There must be a way of ensuring that reluctant departees are gently persuaded – or have their fingers stamped upon hard.

Organisationally, succession planning is commonly thought to be about two things. First, having a detailed plan about who will succeed whom within the organisation; second, about an efficient recruitment process in case a successor has to be sought from outside. This approach has served some organisations well in the past but suffers from the twin diseases identified above – systemisation and a belief that the future will be like the past.

At top levels, succession planning can work only if it is linked to the strategic aims of the business and takes account of the people needed to reposition the business in the changing marketplace. And nowadays all market places are changing, whether the business is manufacturing or service; public sector or private; international, national or regional. Succession planning must:

• grow from the fundamental needs of the business

• have a strong objective input from outside the business

• be ruthless

• respond rapidly to change

• continue over time rather than be a panic reaction

At its simplest, it is about getting the right person at the right time for the job. But it is rarely at its simplest: as Harold Macmillan famously observed, “Events, dear boy, events”, or, as Dick Cheney less languidly but more succinctly said, “Stuff happens”.

All too often, businesses become internalised. They believe that only insiders can understand them, resent criticism – almost resent the customer – and resist change. An outside perspective is essential if the business is not to atrophy.

The concomitant of this is a degree of ruthlessness. The cosy internalised organisation will ascribe virtues to insiders that they do not possess: leaders who have outlived their usefulness will be allowed to cling on too long and the less than competent will be promoted. The art of stamping on the fingers of those who do not want to let go will have been lost.

It is a cliché by now to talk of being responsive to change but many organisations think that change, in people terms, can be achieved painlessly – with a little touch of training here, of management development there . . . different circumstances will often need different people, not just re-trained ones.

Succession planning is about working with, and helping to find, the grain of the organisation’s future direction. It is not just about filling a vacancy, or about defining that vacancy: it is about the whole organisation and its future.

This is where effective professional search and selection is essential to any organisation.