Ralph Ashton is the founder of Next25 and its Executive Director for 12 years. In early August 2023, he announced he would be stepping down into a Non-Executive Director role on the Board.
You’ve just announced the transition publicly, after telling staff and close contacts over the last two months. How does it feel?
It feels right and good and natural - in my head and in my body. Otto Scharmer has a saying of “letting go to let come.” For both Next25 and me, I feel that strongly in this moment. It’s exciting. It’s also a relief - I have known for three or four years that my time carrying the baton would need to end for the mission to continue. And I had told our board in February, so I was holding a secret for months and making decisions based on information I could not tell others. I found that hard because it felt dishonest, but integrity became more important. That gave me a new understanding of the difference between integrity and honesty.
Leadership transitions can be challenging. How has values-based leadership informed your approach to planning and executing your own leadership transition?
Above all I wanted to be true to myself and my intuition (that my time was coming to an end because of what Next25 needs and what I need) and respectful of all the people who make our work possible - my colleagues and team members, donors, partners, Board members, advisors, and mentors. To do that well, I drew on listening (to myself and mentors), caution, and patience. It wasn’t always easy, and at times I felt like I was about to be physically sick, which offered me the chance to reflect on why I was afraid and what was at stake. I held on to the knowing that this was the right thing for long-term success of Next25 and our mission.
What are some of the key actions and processes you undertook that helped plan the transition?
Over the last few years, I gave myself plenty of space and time for reflection and invited others around me to provide feedback through structured processes - I listened to myself and the system around me. That made it clear that the time was coming for me to move on and that I had to be thoughtful about how I did it.
I studied and spoke with leaders of other start-ups to learn from their successes and failures. I sought guidance from close mentors.
I kept the circle very small and planned the process with our Board and senior management team. On the basis that if you tell one person, even if you tell them it’s confidential, they’ll tell one other person, I told only two other people - my mum and a friend.
You are the founder of Next25. Over 12 years, what have you learned about having a vision in a complex system and how to bring others along the journey with you, sharing in that vision?
That clarity helps, but that clarity is hard, and, in the case of Next25, clarity came through chasing the vision through the early but persistent fog. That in the absence of clarity, some people will try to cloak you with their own vision and dreams, which leads to distractions and sometimes disappointment - and that’s okay.
I’ve learnt that it’s very hard to get the balance right between following intuition and listening to others. However, it’s also impossible to do anything alone. Different people are required at different times. And that it’s rare to find someone with a vision and all the abilities to bring others along - the combination certainly eluded me.
Perhaps most importantly, that some of the biggest strides towards the vision can come from people inspired by the attempt to bring the vision to life, whether successful or not; role modelling optimism is powerful.
If you had your time again, is there anything you would change in managing this transition?
Overall, I’m very happy with how the transition has gone. It has opened opportunities for our team, our Board, and our donors. It has also caused stress and turbulence and distracted us from near-term priorities. But I am certain it has set us up for medium- and longer-term success; in fact, if we hadn’t addressed those problems now, we would have faced bigger challenges later.
It wasn’t perfect, but I wonder how helpful hindsight really is. There could be a hundred things to do differently, but then each of those differences would have created a cascade of different outcomes, so it’s impossible to know whether the overall result would have been better.
Perhaps I’m too close to it all and other people are better-placed to answer this question - but I think the most important things were having a clear purpose in mind, understanding what was needed next to enable that, and being clear on and true to how we wanted to implement it.