03rd July 2026
Messi and Ronaldo were HiPo Once, Too
What the World Cup Exposes About Your Talent System: Part One
Somewhere in your organisation there is a list, and on it are the names marked “high potential,” or HiPo for short.
It gets reviewed once a year, usually in a warm room, and everyone leaves feeling reassured.
Now picture a different list. A boy joins a football academy at thirteen. The club decides he is worth a bet and puts in the specialised conditioning, training and coaching that helps him grow.
That bet was not the achievement, it was the start of roughly a decade of relentless competition before anyone called him the best in the world.
Both lists use the same word. They do not mean the same thing.
High potential is a forecast, not a result. It is a bet that someone will become something they are not yet. Most organisations treat the label as the finish line. They identify the potential, add the name to the program, and wait. The waiting is the problem.
Football/Soccer has a conversion engine
But most businesses do not.
Messi and Ronaldo were spotted as children and both made their World Cup debuts as young men in 2006. What turned the forecast into fact was not the label.
It was the system around it: real competition every week, minutes on the pitch, performance everyone could see, honest feedback, and immediate consequences for failure.
Potential met reality constantly, and reality kept score.
Most corporate HiPo programs have none of that. They offer a list, a workshop, and a feeling. The potential is identified and then protected, but nobody puts it under the kind of pressure that would either convert it or expose it.
The conversion rate is brutal
For every Messi or Ronaldo, an academy runs through hundreds of promising players who never make it.
The rate is low and nobody in football pretends otherwise.
Corporate talent systems pretend the opposite.
We act as though nearly everyone on the list will convert, which is how you build a bench that looks deep on paper and vanishes the moment a critical role falls vacant.
The third stage we ignore
Stage 1 – Potential identified.
Stage 2 – Potential realised.
Stage 3 – Potential declining.
Watch this World Cup and you can see all three on one pitch.
Messi is thirty-eight and Ronaldo is forty-one, both at their sixth and almost certainly last tournament, both still contributing, neither the explosive athlete of a decade ago, and both now playing well away from the top of European football.
Football manages this without sentiment, the next generation is already on the pitch. Organisations are far more sentimental and often let a realised star sit on the pipeline long after their peak.
A test you can run on your own list this week
For each name, answer four questions:
- What, specifically, are we betting this person will become?
- What designed experience this quarter is converting that potential into evidence?
- What would tell us the bet is paying off, and what would tell us it is not?
- What does it cost us if we are wrong?
If you cannot answer those four questions for a name, that person is not being developed, they are being listed.
Potential is a hypothesis
Performance is the evidence.
A HiPo program that never tests the hypothesis is an expensive way to feel good about your bench.
Pick one name this quarter and actually test it.
If you want to explore a science-backed process to identify and realise potential in your organisation, get in touch.
Next in the Series: Your nine-box grid tells you who is best in the building. It says nothing about whether they would make the away squad.
Justin Miles
Categories: Uncategorised
