Resilience and succession planning
What happens to your work when you are not there
Most organisations are one departure away from a crisis they have never rehearsed. These are the tools for finding out where you are exposed, and doing something about it before you need to.
Start here
Six resources, all free to copy and adapt. Most people work through them in this order.
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Framework · 60 to 90 minutes
Bus factor audit
Score every part of your operation by how many people could actually pick it up tomorrow. Covers technical systems, governance and decision making, and the relationships nobody has written down.
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Templates · Ongoing
Succession planning guide
Timelines and handoff checklists for the three shapes a departure takes: the planned exit, the sudden absence, and the slow handover that runs over a year or more.
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Checklist · 2 to 3 hours
Legacy checklist
What to put in place in case you die or are suddenly unable to work. Access, credentials, who announces it, what they say, and who holds the authority to decide anything at all.
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Workshop · 45 to 90 minutes
Scenario cards
Twenty five situations to put in front of a team and work through before one of them actually happens. The sudden disappearance, the sole signatory, the founder who will not let go.
Why this exists
The bus factor is a polite name for a harsh question. How many people would have to walk away before the thing you have built stops working?
For most teams the answer is one, and everyone knows who. It is the person who holds the deployment credentials, or the relationship with the biggest funder, or twelve years of context on why a decision was made the way it was. Nothing is written down, because writing it down was never the urgent thing.
This is rarely a technology problem. Projects and organisations come apart because the people carrying them leave, burn out, get ill, or take a job somewhere else, and nobody knows how to continue.
These resources came out of preparing for exactly that. In 2026 I spent three months off grid, out of contact, being ordained in the Spanish mountains. Getting ready meant working through every single point of failure in an open source project with tens of thousands of users, and finding out how many of them were me. What is here is what I wish had already existed.
Workshops and sessions
Nothing scheduled at the moment. These sessions run at conferences, inside organisations, and for community groups.
These get better when more people write them
Everything here came out of transitions that really happened. If you have been through one, the version of this that helps the next person is the one with your experience in it.