Set Up The Next Stage
Set the conditions for the next stage and step away; if it still needs you, change the conditions, not the stage.
Formerly Succession
Rewilding: set the start; the woodland grows itself.
Seen in Agnes Denes, Tree Mountain, Ylöjärvi, 1992–96
Try it on your work
Replace one component of a working thing while it keeps working, then let the replacement settle before replacing the next. After two successions, the order you found yourself choosing is a theory of the thing's structure.
Introduce a new term for something alongside the old term, using both in every mention, and drop the old one only when others use the new one first. Note how long the handover took.
Migrate one process to its successor by running old and new in parallel, moving one case at a time, until the old process handles nothing. The cases that moved last define what the new one still can't do.
How it has been used
Design for what grows after you stop: the forester planting for a forest they won't see, the garden planned in stages of self-seeding, the project handed to its users. The move forbids permanent tending: if it needs you indefinitely, you designed a dependency, not a succession.
Where it leads
Grouped under Let it respond to what happens