Governance Scenario
Standard 6.2 · Succession Planning and Continuity
Five Appointed the Same Year
By Synnovate · Published 2026 · Governance Scenario
The Situation
The board had gone through a significant renewal after a difficult period. Five vacancies had been filled in the same recruitment round - an unusually large cohort of new appointments, driven by a cluster of departures that had coincided with the resolution of a governance challenge. The five new trustees had been well chosen. The board had felt refreshed.
Three years later, at a governance review, the clerk presented the term expiry schedule. Five trustees were reaching the end of their maximum permitted terms within the same twelve-month window. The chair looked at the schedule for a moment. Then she said: we have done this to ourselves.
The plan for replacement was not straightforward. Five vacancies in one year would require a significant recruitment effort. The knowledge base of the board would contract sharply. Three of the five outgoing trustees held committee chair roles that would need to be filled simultaneously.
Provocations
- "A board that recruits in cohorts inherits the retirement of those cohorts."
- "Term limits exist to prevent boards becoming captured. They also create succession challenges that boards rarely plan for."
- "The governance risk of losing five experienced trustees simultaneously is of the same order as the governance risk of keeping them too long."
- "Succession planning that only considers individual trustees will always miss the systemic risk."
Considerations
Board succession planning is most commonly understood as the challenge of replacing individual trustees when they leave. The scenario of simultaneous expiry of multiple terms - which occurs when appointments have been clustered - represents a different and more serious challenge: not individual replacement, but structural continuity.
The reasons for clustered appointments are usually understandable: a governance crisis that required rapid renewal, an organisation that delayed trustee recruitment for too long, a period of significant board growth. The consequences emerge slowly, at the end of the appointment cycle, and are often not visible to the board until it is too late to address them gradually.
The practical implications of losing five trustees simultaneously include: a significant reduction in institutional memory, gaps in committee leadership, a sudden increase in the proportion of the board that is new and still learning, and a recruitment burden that is difficult to manage well at scale. Done under pressure, bulk recruitment produces cohorts that are individually competent but collectively untested.
The long-term solution is a staggered appointment schedule maintained deliberately over time - ensuring that in any given year, no more than one third of the board is new. Achieving this when the board has already clustered its appointments requires either extending some terms where governance frameworks permit, or managing a phased transition with conscious attention to which roles and which knowledge need to be preserved.
Platforms like Loom help boards visualise their succession landscape - term expiry schedules, committee role coverage, skills gaps - so that the systemic risk of clustered departures is visible before it becomes a crisis.