For those larger architecture firms that have survived 50-plus years of practice, the transition from the original owner/architect to a collective leadership and ownership model may have occurred decades ago. HASSELL is an architecture, interiors and landscape firm with studios in Australia, China, Southeast Asia and the UK that was founded in 1938 in Adelaide and takes its name from one of its three founders, Colin Hassell. For HASSELL, succession planning has undergone several stages, from the original founders to leadership under John Morphett, who was influenced by his time working with Walter Gropius at the Bauhaus, to the next phase led by Tim Shannon, which saw the upscaling of the firm through new locations in Asia and elsewhere. Current managing director Rob Backhouse has been in the role for nearly eight years and has recently become chair as well. Constantly on the lookout for the next generation’s leaders, Backhouse describes the practice’s approach as a collective. “Once firms become bigger and they become distributed with multiple locations, to survive and prosper you have to share authorship and ownership,” he says.