Where the ABCD talent audit comes from

Founders often ask us where the ABCD Talent Audit comes from. The honest answer has two parts: grading people against a role has a long history, and the version we built is deliberately different from it.

1. The nine-box grid (1970s)

Plotting people on two axes — performance against potential — is the oldest tool in the talent review room. The nine-box grid is widely attributed to McKinsey and General Electric, and it still runs the calibration sessions of most large companies. It is worth being precise here: there is no single academic paper that documents its invention. It grew out of consulting practice, and that is the honest way to describe it.

2. The War for Talent (1997–2001)

McKinsey's research programme, published as The War for Talent (Michaels, Handfield-Jones and Axelrod, 2001), turned talent into a strategic argument: in a knowledge economy, the quality of people decisions — not the number of processes around them — is what separates companies. It also popularised graded vocabulary: "A players", "topgrading", "talent pool". Most of the language used in reviews today dates from those years.

3. The forced-distribution era and the backlash

General Electric's vitality curve, and the 20-70-10 distribution that followed from it, pushed grading into quotas: a fixed share of top ratings, a fixed share of exits. The critique came quickly. Dick Grote's The Case Against Forced Ranking (Harvard Business Review, 2005) described what happens when a distribution is imposed on a team: collaboration drops, managers optimise for the ranking conversation, and the curve starts shaping decisions instead of describing them.

4. What we kept, and what we dropped

Kept: defined categories, evidence behind every rating, calibration between managers, and a written record that survives the meeting.

Dropped: percentages, quotas and ranking people against each other. The ABCD audit is a calibration, not a curve.

The decisive difference sits in step two of the method: you define what A, B, C and D mean — which examples belong to each category, and which actions a category allows. Nothing is hardcoded by the tool, and the assessment only happens after the role has been written down as a scorecard. Assessed against a defined role, a category is a statement about work. Assessed against a general impression, it is a statement about a person.

Why this matters at 10–150 people

In a company of twenty-five, a rating without a role definition behind it turns a decision into an argument about perception. Two managers describe the same person differently, and there is no document to appeal to. The fix is not a heavier process — it is a shorter one, on top of a record that actually exists. That is the brief the ABCD audit answers, and the reason we built it as employee evaluation software rather than a scoring sheet: the categories are defined by you before anyone is rated, the evidence is attached at the time, and the decision is written down.