After Pierre Le Manh: What Comes Next for the Profession?

Thank you for raising this. I think the short interval between the public announcement and Pierre's departure raises legitimate questions about how the transition was communicated.

I would distinguish, however, between the public notice period and the succession planning itself. Nine days of public notice do not necessarily mean nine days of preparation.
Equally, a well-prepared transition is not necessarily a well-communicated one.

There may be legitimate reasons for keeping the circumstances of Pierre's departure confidential.
But that is different from explaining how executive authority, strategic continuity, and accountability will be maintained during the interim period, and how the permanent successor will be selected.

For an organization that places considerable emphasis on governance and stakeholder engagement, the transition provides an opportunity to demonstrate those principles in practice.

And this connects with the questions I originally raised: beyond the leadership change itself, how will PMI preserve, reconsider, or develop the strategic direction established over the past four years?

Thank you, Antonio.
I think your final question opens an important line of inquiry, but I would be careful about one assumption embedded in it.

If an organization begins to lose system-level coherence, can we necessarily infer that its integrative capability is failing?

Not necessarily.
Coherence may deteriorate even when the intended integrative mechanisms operate as designed, because those mechanisms may be insufficient for the constraints or disturbances the organization faces.
Conversely, acceptable performance may be sustained through compensatory mechanisms whose contribution, limits, or sustainability are not visible in the formal architecture.

That makes your question about early warning signals particularly valuable, provided we do not assume in advance what those signals mean.

We would need to investigate which mechanisms and capabilities actually contributed to preserving, losing, or restoring coherence, what constrained their effectiveness, and whether the actors involved had the information and legitimate authority needed to respond.

I would also keep the three possibilities you identified open rather than privilege emergence at this stage. They may not even be mutually exclusive: a systemic capacity could emerge from interactions among mechanisms that are partly embedded in governance and partly located elsewhere.

Perhaps the diagnostic challenge is therefore twofold: what observations might indicate that integrative capacity is becoming inadequate, and what evidence would distinguish that explanation from competing ones?

That would allow us to investigate what integration actually requires without assuming in advance where it resides, how it is produced, or why coherence changes.

Thank you, Luis. I believe there is another dimension worth considering: the role of organizational architecture in shaping the conditions under which integration succeeds or deteriorates. From my experience working within operational and continuous improvement systems, I have observed that deficiencies do not always originate at the operational level. In some cases, they reflect structural misalignments in how authority, accountability, technical competence, communication, and decision-making are distributed. When these misalignments remain unaddressed, operational deficiencies can become normalized. Corrective signals may reach leadership without producing action, responsibilities may exist formally without the corresponding technical capability, and individuals who identify structural weaknesses may encounter resistance when attempting to address them. Over time, these conditions can influence behavior far beyond the original problem. What begins as an unres- as an unresolved gap can become an informal precedent, reshaping the boundaries of acceptable practice and weakening the organization’s ability to correct itself.