When a pope dies, a cardinal called the Camerlengo walks to the papal apartment and puts seals on the study and the bedroom. What happens next was set down in an apostolic constitution in 1996, and the text is unusually plain about what the interval is for. Government of the Church passes to the College of Cardinals “solely for the dispatch of ordinary business and of matters which cannot be postponed.”2 Anything belonging to the office itself waits for whoever fills it. Every head of a Roman Curia department stops exercising his office the day the pope dies, with two positions named in the text as exceptions so the money and the paperwork keep moving.2

An institution that decided the gap was worth legislating

Two thousand years of practice at replacing its most senior person led the Church to conclude that the space between one occupant and the next is hazardous enough to govern in detail. The interval gets a name, a custodian, and a written account of what may be touched and what must wait. Companies run the same interval several thousand times a year and commit almost none of it to paper, on the working assumption that a capable successor plus a decent handover document will cover the difference. There is now a measurement of what that assumption costs.

What the calendars and the mailboxes actually did

Stephen Impink, Andrea Prat and Raffaella Sadun obtained something researchers almost never get: firm-level communication metadata from an email provider, covering internal meetings and internal email for 102 companies through the months surrounding a CEO transition, aggregated so no firm could be identified by anyone including the authors. Intra-firm communication falls roughly 10 percent immediately after the turnover, then rises roughly 33 percent about five months later.1 The recovery runs mostly along vertical lines, managers and employees talking across hierarchical layers, while traffic between peers contributes much less.1

The authors are careful about what metadata can and cannot see. There is no content, so nothing in the data tells you whether a given meeting was worth attending. Only communication on that one provider’s platform is captured, which leaves out phone calls, messaging apps, personal email and the corridor.1 A calendar entry records that somebody did not decline an invitation, which is a weaker fact than attendance.1

The reading the authors decline to make

Firms with a bigger medium-term rise in communication also saw better market returns, and the obvious thing to do with that sentence is turn it into advice. Talk more after a transition and the stock will thank you. The paper refuses this. The authors describe the relationship as an association, state outright that they claim no causation, and offer an alternative in their own text: an unobserved firm-level shock could be moving the returns and the communication together.1 The timing also sits badly with the simple story, because the performance divergence shows up in the earlier months, ahead of the communication increase.1 A leader who reads the headline and schedules more all-hands meetings has taken nothing useful from the study.

A handover suspends more than the leader’s decisions. It suppresses the organization’s conversation with itself for the better part of half a year, and almost no transition plan carries a line item for that.

Where those months actually go

Consider what the quiet consists of. People who knew who to ask no longer know whether the answer still holds. Work that ran on a standing exception, an unwritten allowance, a name near the top who could be relied on to say yes, moves into a queue nobody has been told to empty. Coordination that used to run on two directors understanding each other now needs a ruling, and nobody is authorized to rule. A related failure, which I will not relitigate here, is the way a message that once produced aligned action loses its meaning without deliberate renewal.

In a working session earlier this week on acquisition integration, a practitioner who has run several of them described her opening move after a deal closes. Before she touches the agenda she maps who the leaders actually are, both the ones on the chart and the ones people go to anyway. Her reasoning was blunt and worth repeating. The incoming thesis is usually wrong, because the person carrying it has not listened yet. She was describing this same interval from the inside, and treating it as work instead of waiting.

The know-how a company accumulates behaves more like a balance sheet item than a program, an argument I made recently when researchers found a way to measure organizational capital from employee reviews. Prat is an author on both papers, which I note as a coincidence and nothing more. What the transition data adds is timing. The months after a leadership change are exactly when that accumulated capital is hardest for anyone to reach, because the routing that made it reachable ran through a person who is no longer there.

Write the interval down

Four things belong on paper before the announcement goes out. Give the interval a stated length so people know they are inside a defined period with an end date on it. Name who holds ordinary business, with real authority over decisions that cannot wait, and push that name past the top two layers. Say what is not changing, in specifics, because the absence of that sentence is what turns a pause into speculation. Then list what genuinely waits for the new person, and be as severe about it as the 1996 constitution is, since a decision that waits by design behaves nothing like a decision that fell down a hole.

None of it requires the incoming leader to do anything, which is the point. The building goes quiet whether or not the successor turns out to be any good. If you have lived through one of these, I am curious what your first months felt like from the middle of the org, and whether anyone above you gave any sign of knowing the gap was there.