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Everything ends. When it happens, we tend to treat it as an interruption — something to get through so we can return to normal work. But the ending is where the truth is. Someone loses a job. A family loses the program they'd come to count on. The rest of us go quiet, and the quiet does its own damage.
I've come to think the endings are the real work.
I run a book access and family reading nonprofit, serve in the leadership of a national association, and have served on many boards and committees. Most of what I've built has been intended to keep going after I stop touching it — not always successfully, which is part of what I want to write about. I also write plays. And I wrote a dissertation on how people in organizations talk about impermanence, and what they do — and don't do — about it.
I'm working on a book called Leadership Through Impermanence. Continuity Works is where I think it through in public first. It's monthly or so essays on leadership, discoveries, and what we carry forward with us to make sense of it all.
If you're leading something you won't lead forever, I'm glad to be of company.