If you’ve sat in a succession planning meeting in the last twenty years, chances are you’ve seen a 9-box grid on the screen. Nine squares, two axes, a room full of managers debating who counts as “high potential.” It’s familiar. It’s tidy. And for a lot of organisations, it’s starting to show its age.<\/p>\n
I want to spend some time here on what’s replacing it, and more importantly, what actually suits your organisation. Because the honest answer isn’t “throw out the grid and use this instead.” It’s “know what your organisation can handle first, then choose your tool.”<\/p>\n
The 9-box grid plots people on two axes: current performance and future potential. Nine boxes come out of that, from “low performer, low potential” through to “high performer, high potential,” often nicknamed things like Star, Enigma or Workhorse. Managers place employees in a box, usually once a year, and those placements feed decisions on promotions, development investment and succession pipelines.<\/p>\n
It’s been around since the 1970s, and it earned its popularity honestly. It’s visual, it’s quick and it gives leadership<\/a> teams a shared language for a genuinely hard question: who’s ready for what’s next?<\/p>\n The cracks in the 9-box grid aren’t a secret. Gallup’s research into CHROs found only 3% strongly agree their organisation is excellent at identifying the right people for management roles, and while 64% still use the grid for succession decisions, only 9% strongly agree it actually works. That’s a big gap between habit and confidence.<\/p>\n Three things tend to drive that gap:<\/p>\n It leans hard on one person’s judgement<\/strong>, usually a direct manager, which opens the door to proximity bias. The people who get face time with leadership, or who present confidently, often get read as “high potential,” while quieter, steady contributors sit in the middle boxes indefinitely. Research by Alan Benson, Danielle Li and Kelly Shue, published as “‘Potential’ and the Gender Promotion Gap,” looked at nearly 30,000 management-track employees at a large North American retailer, a company that used the Nine Box system itself. Women scored higher than men on performance, but were rated 8.3% lower on potential, and were 14% less likely to be promoted. The researchers found those potential ratings explained up to half the overall promotion gap. Even when women outperformed their stated potential, managers didn’t revise their ratings upward the following year. That’s not a small data point. It’s a pattern worth taking seriously.<\/p>\n It’s also a once-a-year snapshot<\/strong> of something that doesn’t move in yearly increments. Skills, motivation and readiness shift constantly. A grid completed in March can be out of date by August.<\/p>\n And the labels stick.<\/strong> Once someone’s filed as an “Enigma” or a “Workhorse,” that framing tends to follow them into the next review, whether or not it’s still true.<\/p>\n “64% of CHROs still use the 9-box grid for succession decisions. Only 9% strongly agree it actually works.”<\/p>\n There’s no shortage of frameworks stepping in to fill the gap. Here’s where I’d start looking, and what to weigh up before you commit to any of them.<\/p>\nWhere it starts to strain<\/h2>\n
So what are the alternatives?<\/h2>\n