How to Pass the Torch
“Knowledge transfer” → Passing on expertise, traditions, and procedures to others before leaving office
You know the moment.
The day the passwords change. The spreadsheet with everyone’s phone numbers leaves your desktop and starts living somewhere else.
You are no longer steering the ship.
It feels amazing.
We talk about legacy like it’s something we can protect by holding on. The truth is that you protect a legacy by letting it go.
Theseus’s ship is the old metaphor: if every plank is replaced, is it still the same ship? The question only matters if you think the point was the wood. The ship was built to sail.
The Five Good Emperors reigned in the Roman Empire from 96 CE to 180 CE. What made them “Good” was that, across their reigns, they prioritized succession planning and welfare infrastructure. They made administrative systems and routines explicit, and trained their successors. In organizational theory, “redundancy” means having backup systems so that if one part fails, the whole system doesn’t collapse. This distributes authority so power isn’t concentrated in one person and transitions happen smoothly.
Contrast this with cases where successive memory was deliberately ruined.
The War on Drugs (since 1971).
John Ehrlichman, one of Nixon’s top aides, admitted decades later:
We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.
In 1985, the MOVE bombing of 6221 Osage Avenue in Philadelphia erased 61 homes and severed generations of community memory in one afternoon. As survivor Ramona Africa reflects: “They don’t have to justify it… a bomb was dropped, babies were burned alive… do you see people in the streets turning this country out?” The city’s failure to record or honor what was lost is one void left when oral traditions evaporate.
If knowledge is our defense, the MOVE bombing teaches that forgetting, too, can be weaponized.
The policy was amnesia. Communities that had relied on oral history and networks of trust were systematically interrupted. We lost a connective tissue that carried memory across generations of how to organize, how to defend one another.
Nowadays, we cannot afford to be precious about ownership. “My notes.” “My network.” “My idea.” Organizing today requires balancing two demands that often feel at odds: hyperlocal relationships and broad information sharing.
You need to know your neighbors, but you also need widespread networks that can carry the work beyond any single person.
Organizing today requires balancing two demands that often feel at odds: hyperlocal relationships and broad information sharing.
That’s how community defense becomes contagious, like it has in Chicago, where neighbors host know your rights workshops on street corners and students carry whistles in their backpacks. The knowledge spreads because it’s actively shared.
Digital security complicates this rhythm—how do you share without exposing people?
Build a culture of security: Show people how to safeguard themselves online to keep sensitive information from circulating.
Adapt to context: Some information needs to travel quickly, like warning neighbors about a threat. Share selectively.
Layer information: Structure what you share so that sensitive details are protected while critical alerts still reach the right people.
Once, I called my dad because I was tired. The work felt endless. He said, “You just have to do your work. And then they have to do their work.”
Do your work, then you hand over the keys, and then watch the ship sail.
