What-if scenario (cascade analysis)
A what-if scenario models the impact of a hypothetical departure or move — including the chain of backfills it triggers — so an organization can see its exposure before it happens.
A what-if scenario asks: if this person left, what would happen? Cascade analysis follows the chain — the successor who steps up leaves their own seat open, and so on — so the full ripple of a single departure is visible rather than guessed at.
SuccessionStack models these scenarios up to three levels deep, shows which plans go thin and which roles uncover, and generates a plain-English summary of the impact. Hypothetical mode never touches the real org data.
Cascades are where single-role planning breaks. Plans built one role at a time look complete individually and still fail together, because the same strong candidate is quietly the successor on three different plans. The exposure lives between the documents, and only a chain-following model can see it.
The useful habit is treating cascade tests like fire drills: run them for the five most damaging departures, rerun them after every reorg (reorgs rewire the chains), and fix the double-counted successors they surface while the fix is still cheap.
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