Abstract: For decades, the 9-box grid has been the standard tool for talent reviews, succession planning, and identifying high potentials. But most organizations use it very differently than originally intended. In Part 1 of this series, we go back to the origins of the performance- potential grid, why it was created, the specific problems it solved, and how it brought structure and discipline to talent decisions. Understanding where the 9-box started is key to understanding where it began to drift and why many related talent reviews fall short today.
The 9-Box framework has been a defining tool in talent management for decades. Known by many names — The 9-Box, The Matrix, The Grid, and to some, simply the Chart — it became a common language for discussing performance and potential across organizations.
Born in the late 1970s, it quickly proved useful to classify capability, guide talent reviews and bring structure to succession planning. For more than half a century, it helped leaders make sense of performance and promise, or at least, it tried to.
At its best, the Grid brought clarity. It sparked robust dialogue, encouraged talent differentiation and helped impose order on what had previously been a highly subjective process. It gave leaders a way to talk about talent with more objectivity, consistency and discipline.
But over time, something changed. As the tool spread, its original intent became less clear. What was designed to solve a very specific set of problems gradually became a generalized framework, often applied without the context, rigor, or assumptions that made it effective in the first place.
In this two-part series, we will explore how the Grid lost its way by going back to where it started, and what it was originally designed to fix.
Where It All Started: A Very Specific Problem to Solve
At the birth of the grid, Robert Eichinger was serving as an external consultant, working alongside two Frito-Lay colleagues, Steven Wall and Richard Grote, to help prepare Frito-Lay executives for a new PepsiCo talent review process. The goal was to identify high potentials and “protentials,” and to equip them with targeted Individual Development Plans (IDPs) that would accelerate their readiness for future leadership roles.
John Ewing, then CHRO, was determined that Frito-Lay would stand out among the PepsiCo divisions. However, the first round of talent reviews fell short of expectations, and John asked our team to step in and make it better.
Four Problems Undermining Talent Decisions
When we examined what had occurred in the first round, several issues became clear:
- Lack of clarity on potential. Most executive presenters didn’t truly know what a high potential looked like. At the time, there was little research or common language on the topic, so their nominations were largely subjective.
- Confusion between performance and potential. Even those who approached the task with care often conflated strong performance with high potential, assuming the two were synonymous.
- Resistance to corporate talent mobility. Many leaders were not yet aligned with the emerging philosophy of managing future talent across PepsiCo’s operating divisions. They still subscribed to a “States’ Rights” mentality, believing they owned their own talent. The concept of corporate Talent Management facilitating cross-divisional development was not widely embraced.
- Over-nomination. Some executives took pride in claiming, “All my people are high potentials, I wouldn’t have hired them otherwise.” The result, predictably, was an overabundance of nominees.
Andral Pearson, who was serving as COO at the time, was unimpressed with the initial outcomes of the review and tasked Corporate Talent Management and me with strengthening the process.
The Discipline the 9-Box Grid Forced into the System
In a single afternoon at Frito-Lay’s Dallas headquarters, we developed “the grid”, a tool intended to remedy the gaps and inconsistencies we had identified in the talent review process.
- Clarifying the difference between performance and potential.
Executives tended to equate current performance with future potential. To address this, we split the grid into two axes: performance on one side and potential on the other. Our intent was to help executives separate the short-term assessment of performance from the longer-term estimate of potential. The message was clear: they are not the same. We created supporting training materials, much of it adapted from the Center for Creative Leadership (CCL), to reinforce this distinction. - Introducing rank ordering.
To counter the common refrain, “All my people are high potentials,” we added a rank-ordering requirement. Executives resisted the idea, but the COO insisted, and the process moved forward, despite considerable grumbling. - Establishing a 3×3 framework.
Research at the time suggested that untrained evaluators could reliably make only three distinctions, which is why five-point scales typically compress to three points in practice. Based on that insight, we designed the grid as a 3×3 matrix: three levels of performance and three levels of potential. - Encouraging differentiation.
To gently push for greater distinction, we required that ratings fall into three equal groups, roughly one-third highest, one-third middle, and one-third lowest. The guidance was to think in terms of highest and lowest, not simply high and low. Competitive executives argued that all their people outperformed everyone else’s. We acknowledged that this was possible and explained that cross-group calibration would reconcile those differences after the reviews. - Titling and numbering the cells.
We titled and numbered the nine cells to describe the general nature of individuals who landed in each. The numbering served as a nine-point long-term value index, intended to guide investment in development. The numbering logic followed research suggesting that future potential was more valuable than current performance, rather than traditional graphing conventions. - Linking to development action.
For each cell, we developed corresponding treatment, development, and retention strategies to inform Individual Development Plan (IDP) discussions and ensure the process translated into action.
What Changed Once the 9-Box Grid was Introduced
The resulting 9-box grid was designed to elevate the quality of talent discussions and bring greater accuracy to identifying true potential. While there was considerable pushback from presenting executives, the COO stood firm; this was the approach he wanted. As a result, all divisions began using the grid. Each year, we enhanced the pre-review training, incorporating the latest research on the characteristics of high potential to continually refine the process.
During the reviews, the discussions became far more robust, and the “scrubbing” (the movement of individuals from one cell to another) was more deliberate and candid. The outcome was a noticeably stronger talent review process: fewer individuals were labeled as consensus high potentials, and executives became more astute about their responsibility to identify and develop longer-term talent. The complaints about rank ordering persisted for a while, but eventually, they subsided.
The Grid Began to Lose Its Way
Over the past fifty years, the 9-box grid has been adopted (with implementation success varying widely) by most of the Fortune 1000 and has spread around the world. It served its original purpose admirably, and the evolution of our understanding of potential has progressed, which will impact its future application. It’s time to move forward.
