The language of succession, defined in plain English.

Succession planning

Succession planning is the process of identifying and developing internal people who can step into critical roles when they become vacant. Done well, it turns an unplanned departure from a crisis into a transition, because a ready successor is already known and being developed.

Modern succession planning covers more than the CEO. It maps the handful of roles where a sudden vacancy would hurt — leadership, specialist, and single-point-of-failure positions — and tracks who could fill each one, how ready they are, and what development closes the gap.

Bench strength

Bench strength is the depth of ready, internal talent an organization can call on for its critical roles. A role with two or three credible successors has a strong bench; a role with none has a gap that represents real risk.

Tracking bench strength across the org shows leaders where continuity is solid and where a single departure would leave a hole. It is one of the clearest signals of whether a succession plan is actually working.

Readiness (Ready Now, 1 year, 2–3 years)

Readiness describes how soon a candidate could step into a target role and succeed. It is commonly expressed in windows — Ready Now, ready in roughly a year, and ready in two to three years — so a plan distinguishes people who could cover a role tomorrow from those who are promising but still developing.

Grouping candidates by readiness window turns a flat list of names into a pipeline. SuccessionStack maps each plan's bench across these three windows so HR can see, at a glance, whether cover exists today or only on the horizon.

9-box grid

The 9-box grid plots employees on a three-by-three matrix — typically performance on one axis and potential on the other — producing nine cells that range from low performance/low potential to high performance/high potential. It gives leaders a shared visual language for talent calibration.

The framework was popularized by McKinsey & Company in work with General Electric in the 1970s and remains a staple of talent reviews. It is most useful as a conversation starter for calibration, not as a final verdict on a person.

Leadership dimensions

Leadership dimensions are the named competencies an organization uses to evaluate leaders consistently — for example strategic thinking, people leadership, execution, or judgment under pressure. Scoring everyone against the same dimensions makes comparisons fair and decisions defensible.

SuccessionStack scores leaders on eight leadership dimensions and lets HR adjust the weighting per role, because the mix that matters for a sales leader differs from the mix for a head of engineering. Every score and weight change is recorded in the audit log.

High-potential (HiPo)

A high-potential — often shortened to HiPo — is an employee judged able to grow into substantially bigger or more complex roles, not just to perform well in their current one. Potential and current performance are different things: a strong performer is not automatically a high-potential, and vice versa.

Identifying HiPos helps an organization focus development investment where it will compound. It works best when the criteria are explicit and applied consistently, so the label reflects assessed capability rather than visibility or proximity to leadership.

Talent review

A talent review is a structured session — usually run annually or twice a year — where leaders discuss their people, calibrate ratings so standards are consistent across teams, and agree on succession, development, and retention actions.

The value of a talent review is the calibration: comparing notes surfaces blind spots, challenges inflated or harsh ratings, and produces decisions the group will actually stand behind. Good preparation — current scores, bench views, and succession plans in one place — is what makes the meeting productive.

Key-person risk

Key-person risk is the exposure created when a single individual holds critical knowledge, relationships, or responsibilities and no one else could step in quickly. The risk is invisible until that person resigns, retires, or is unavailable — at which point it becomes urgent.

Reducing key-person risk means knowing where it sits and building a bench against it. Modeling a departure before it happens — seeing which roles uncover and which plans go thin — turns an abstract worry into a specific, addressable list.

What-if scenario (cascade analysis)

A what-if scenario asks: if this person left, what would happen? Cascade analysis follows the chain — the successor who steps up leaves their own seat open, and so on — so the full ripple of a single departure is visible rather than guessed at.

SuccessionStack models these scenarios up to three levels deep, shows which plans go thin and which roles uncover, and generates a plain-English summary of the impact. Hypothetical mode never touches the real org data.

Succession plan

A succession plan is the working document for a single critical role: who the candidates are, how ready each one is, where the gaps lie, and what development would close them. Together, the plans across an organization form its overall succession strategy.

A plan is only useful if it stays current. Treating succession as a living view that updates as people grow and move — rather than a slide deck refreshed once a year — is what separates real readiness from a paper exercise.

Talent pool (pipeline)

A talent pool — sometimes called a pipeline — develops a group of people against a role or family of roles, rather than naming one successor per seat. It is useful when several similar roles draw from the same kind of talent, such as a cohort of future general managers.

Pools add flexibility: instead of betting on one named successor who might leave, an organization grows a bench it can draw from for whichever role opens first.

Org health

Org health is a roll-up view of how well-positioned an organization's leadership and talent are. It combines signals such as bench strength, the spread of leadership scores, and pipeline depth by readiness into a picture leaders can act on.

SuccessionStack surfaces org health as a composite score with the underlying charts one click away, so a board-level summary and the people behind it stay connected.

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