Boards come to a search firm when a successor is not obvious. That sentence is less an indictment of the sitting team than a description of the last decade: thinner benches, longer tenures, and a market that punishes a public miss.
The useful question is not “who is available”. It is “what risk is the board actually underwriting”. A chair who wants continuity is running a different search from a chair who wants a break with the last strategy. Mixing the two produces a shortlist that satisfies nobody and a process that leaks.
What we ask a nomination committee to decide first
Before a single conversation with the market, we ask the committee to write down three things: the decisions the next leader must make in year one, the things the current culture will not tolerate, and the price of waiting another two quarters. Those answers change the longlist more than any sector map.
A tighter market does not mean fewer good people. It means the best people have more information, more options, and less patience for a brief that was written by committee. Discretion still matters. So does pace. The firms that treat those as opposites are the ones whose processes become news.
A note on internal candidates
Internal candidates deserve a process that can say no without humiliating them, and a process that can say yes without the market concluding the search was theatre. We assess internals against the same evidence we would use on an external, and we tell the chair the result in a form they can take to the full board.
This is not a manifesto. It is how we run the work.