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HKS’s CEO transition shows how a large architecture and design firm can treat succession as a multi-year leadership system rather than a last-minute replacement. The firm developed potential leaders before Dan Noble’s departure was imminent, separated CEO and president responsibilities during a 2024 restructuring, selected Heath May as Noble’s successor, and then used a year-long, highly visible handover. HKS says the approach was designed to preserve its values and collaborative culture while adding the technological fluency and human insight needed for changing practice models, artificial intelligence, climate pressures and evolving client expectations.
This is an insider case study, not independent proof that the process produced better financial, retention or client results. Its value is practical: Noble and May document specific choices that other architecture, engineering and construction firms can examine, adapt or reject.
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HKS’s succession unfolded through several public steps between February 2024 and February 2026. The dates show that the CEO appointment was the visible end of a longer leadership-design effort, not the beginning of succession planning.
| Date | What HKS announced or described |
|---|---|
| February 21, 2024 | HKS announced a leadership structure with Dan Noble as CEO and chairman and Sam Mudro as president, describing it as preparation for the firm’s future and a way to develop leaders across the organization. HKS’s announcement provides the firm’s account. |
| March 18, 2024 | The new leadership team explained the split between CEO and president as a way to balance strategy and vision with implementation, accountability and results. That is their rationale, not a universal governance rule. |
| December 17, 2024 | HKS announced that Heath May would succeed Noble as CEO. The announcement highlighted May’s work in computational design, research and innovation. |
| February 3, 2026 | HKS published Noble and May’s account of the transition, originally published by Building Design & Construction, describing the preparation, overlap and lessons. |
The chronology matters for boards because it separates three decisions that are often collapsed into one: how to build a leadership bench, how to define the chief executive role, and how to transfer authority without destabilizing the firm.
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How did HKS begin succession planning before a departure was imminent?
HKS says it launched a firmwide leadership-development program about two years before publishing its transition account, bringing together more than 100 leaders from different practices and geographies. The curriculum emphasized emotional intelligence, clear communication and sound decision-making. In a decentralized design firm, that cross-practice reach is intended to make leadership development an organizational capability rather than a private conversation among a few executives.
The firm also says it assessed readiness with structured behavioral assessments, performance data and qualitative insight. HKS reports that the information informed decisions throughout the business, including consideration of CEO successors. The published account does not disclose the assessment instruments, scoring thresholds, comparison results or any independent validation, so other firms should treat the method as a description of HKS’s process, not a validated predictive model.
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Why did HKS separate the CEO and president roles?
In February 2024, HKS placed Noble in the CEO-and-chairman role and Mudro in the president role. In a follow-up conversation, the leadership team said the division was intended to balance strategy and vision with implementation, accountability and results. That explanation should be read as HKS’s design choice for its own scale and circumstances, not as a blanket recommendation that every AEC firm split the jobs.
A role split can clarify where long-range direction is set and where operating performance is managed, but it can also create ambiguity if decision rights are not explicit. Boards considering a similar structure should document who owns capital allocation, talent decisions, client relationships, risk, practice standards and communication with employees. They should also specify how disagreements are resolved and what authority transfers when the CEO changes.
For HKS, the structure also created a visible leadership system before the succession announcement. That gave the organization a chance to experience distributed responsibility rather than treating May’s appointment as an abrupt redesign of governance.
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What happened during HKS’s year-long CEO handover?
After May was selected, HKS designed a transition lasting about a year. May shadowed responsibilities, co-led board and firmwide strategic meetings, and worked with firm leaders to learn the organization’s operating rhythm. Noble and May held joint town halls and visited offices to explain what would remain consistent and what would evolve.
Noble and May describe the overlap as an intentional experience for employees, clients and leaders. A gradual transfer gives the incoming CEO access to context that is difficult to capture in briefing documents: why past decisions were made, how informal networks work, where practices differ, and which commitments are genuinely non-negotiable. It also lets the outgoing CEO coach without retaining indefinite control.
The authors argue that visible communication reduces the anxiety that can accompany uncertainty. That is their experience-based judgment, not an independently measured finding. Still, the mechanics are concrete: schedule joint appearances, repeat the continuity-and-change message in multiple formats, and give regional and practice leaders opportunities to ask questions directly.
How can a firm maintain its culture while changing leadership?
HKS says it distinguished cultural constants from areas open to evolution. The constants included its values, collaborative ethos and commitment to design excellence. At the same time, the firm wanted new energy and perspective, including a different generation’s approach to technology and practice.
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That distinction is especially important for global or multi-office firms. A value such as collaboration is meaningful only when leaders explain what it requires in staffing, project reviews, knowledge sharing and client work. Noble and May say culture clarity helps decentralized practices and offices understand what is shared, while leaving room for local expression and innovation.
They also identify mentorship between outgoing and incoming leaders as a continuity mechanism. Mentorship is not the same as cloning: the outgoing leader transfers institutional memory and judgment, while the successor is expected to make independent choices. Firms should define the boundary in advance so that advice does not become shadow authority.
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The HKS article repeats the saying commonly attributed to Peter Drucker that culture eats strategy for breakfast. Because the article does not provide a primary citation for that attribution, the safer takeaway is the underlying point: a strategic plan cannot be implemented if everyday behavior, incentives and decision norms pull in another direction.
What should an architecture or construction board look for in a successor?
HKS says it looked for a leader who could keep design central while bringing human insight and technological fluency. The firm connected the CEO role to integrating new tools, changing how work is done and partnering with clients to redefine value. Its appointment announcement separately described May’s reputation in computational design, research and innovation.
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Those criteria reflect HKS’s stated priorities and May’s described background; they do not establish that one profile fits every AEC firm. A regional contractor may need different operational depth from a global design practice. A partnership transitioning from a founder may prioritize governance maturity, while a firm facing rapid digital adoption may put greater weight on technology translation.
A useful board scorecard can therefore group evidence into four categories:
- Mission and design judgment: Can the candidate protect the firm’s purpose and quality standards while making difficult trade-offs?
- Human leadership: Does the candidate communicate clearly, make sound decisions under pressure and develop other leaders?
- Technology and business fluency: Can the candidate connect computational methods, artificial intelligence or data practices to client value without treating tools as strategy?
- Change leadership: Can the candidate adapt delivery models, talent practices and partnerships while maintaining trust?
Boards should require behavioral examples and references for each category rather than relying on a résumé or reputation. HKS’s published account does not provide a weighting system, so firms must set their own priorities.
How does design thinking apply to leadership succession?
Noble and May describe applying design thinking to the transition: prototype elements of the new arrangement, test assumptions, make adjustments and focus on how people experience the change. In practice, that can mean piloting a decision-rights map with one practice, testing a town-hall format with a representative group, or revising the handover calendar after leaders identify an information gap.
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This approach treats succession as a designed process rather than an administrative event. It also creates permission to correct a plan before a problem becomes a public crisis. The discipline is to define what is being tested, who can change it and what evidence will trigger a revision. Without those rules, “iteration” can become indecision.
What can firms learn by comparing gradual and abrupt succession?
HKS’s account supports a set of questions for evaluating a firm’s own process. It does not provide comparative outcome data proving that one approach always wins.
| Decision area | Gradual, designed approach | Departure-triggered approach | Question for the board |
|---|---|---|---|
| Timing | Leadership development and role definition begin before a vacancy. | Search begins when the departure is announced. | What capabilities would be impossible to build quickly? |
| Handover | Incoming and outgoing leaders overlap on strategic work. | Authority transfers on a fixed date with limited shared preparation. | Which relationships and operating knowledge need a deliberate transfer? |
| Communication | Joint forums explain what stays and what changes. | Employees and clients infer the plan from announcements. | Where could silence create avoidable uncertainty? |
| Culture | Values are named as constants while practices can evolve. | Continuity is assumed or change is presented as a wholesale reset. | Which behaviors must remain visible after the handover? |
| Selection criteria | Capabilities reflect future industry conditions as well as past performance. | Selection favors tenure, tradition or current results alone. | What will clients and talent expect three to five years from now? |
What is a practical succession playbook for an AEC firm?
The HKS case can be translated into a sequence without treating it as a universal formula:
- Define the future context. List the changes most likely to affect the firm’s work, such as AI-enabled workflows, climate and energy requirements, new delivery models or changing talent expectations.
- Describe the CEO role for that context. Separate enduring responsibilities from capabilities that may need to expand, and clarify how the CEO interacts with the board, president or managing partners.
- Build a cross-firm leadership cohort. Include practices, regions and functions rather than limiting development to headquarters. HKS says its program included more than 100 leaders.
- Use multiple evidence sources. Combine structured behavioral assessment, performance information and qualitative observation. Document limitations and avoid false precision.
- Test decision rights before the transition. Let leaders practice the proposed governance model on real strategic work and resolve overlaps while the incumbent is still available.
- Select for future needs and cultural credibility. Evaluate mission, people leadership, technology fluency and change capacity, not just recent financial performance.
- Plan a visible overlap. Set a transition calendar with shared meetings, office visits, client communication and explicit milestones for transferring authority.
- Measure the transition responsibly. Track whether employees understand the plan, whether decisions are timely and whether key relationships have continuity. Do not claim that these indicators prove business success.
What can go wrong in a CEO transition?
The most common risks are predictable. An overlap can confuse employees if both leaders appear to have final authority. A role split can produce duplicated decisions. A culture message can sound empty if compensation, promotion and project staffing reward different behavior. A technology-forward successor can be judged either too cautiously or too quickly, before the firm has clarified what change is actually required.
Safeguards include a written delegation matrix, a single source of truth for transition milestones, regular confidential feedback from practice leaders, and a published date for the incumbent’s final decision authority. Boards should also preserve a channel for concerns that does not require employees to choose sides between outgoing and incoming leaders.
What does the HKS case not prove?
HKS’s article and announcements document what the firm says it did. They do not report post-transition revenue, profitability, employee-retention figures, client outcomes or independent assessments showing that the handover caused any subsequent result. They also do not establish that a year-long overlap, a CEO-president split or a specific assessment process is optimal for every firm.
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That limitation does not make the case useless. It tells readers how to use it: as a detailed design example and a set of questions for governance, not as a guaranteed recipe. Firms adopting similar steps should define their own objectives and collect evidence over time.
How should construction and design firms apply these lessons now?
Start with a board-level conversation about the firm’s future work, then audit whether current leadership development produces people ready for that future. Name the cultural commitments that cannot be traded away, identify practices that need experimentation, and create opportunities for potential successors to lead across geographies and disciplines.
When a successor is chosen, make the handover observable. Give employees repeated chances to hear the same continuity-and-change message, let the incoming leader work alongside the incumbent on consequential decisions, and explain when authority will move. Finally, review the process after the transition using evidence rather than anecdotes.
HKS’s central lesson is straightforward: succession is part of leadership design. Preparing the next CEO, defining the role around future conditions and designing the human experience of change can be planned years before the formal announcement.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is a one-year CEO overlap required for a successful succession?
No. HKS chose a year-long overlap, but its published account does not compare that duration with shorter or longer handovers. The appropriate length depends on role complexity, geographic spread, regulatory obligations and how much institutional knowledge must transfer.
How can a private architecture or construction firm assess successors without a large HR department?
Use a small, repeatable evidence set: structured interviews, documented examples of decisions, project and people outcomes, 360-degree feedback, and observation in cross-functional work. Keep the criteria tied to the firm’s future strategy and record who reviewed each piece of evidence.
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That is a governance choice, not a requirement demonstrated by the HKS case. Boards should assess independence, accountability, investor or partner expectations, and whether the arrangement gives the incoming CEO real authority rather than symbolic responsibility.
How do you tell whether employees understand a succession plan?
Ask employees and practice leaders to explain, in their own words, what will stay the same, what will change, who makes which decisions and when authority transfers. Compare responses across offices and disciplines; inconsistent answers reveal communication gaps that a single announcement can miss.
