IP3 Identifies People Risk. Leadership Continuity Manages It.

I have watched leadership teams name every role that could hurt them, yet still get caught flat-footed when one of those roles opens. Finding the risk turned out to be the easy half of the work.

Over years of leading succession planning inside complex manufacturing organizations, eventually covering more than 160 critical roles across 13 plants, I built two connected models so the second half would get the same discipline as the first.

The first model locates the risk. I call it the IP3 Talent Model™, and it looks at people risk through three connected elements:

1. Impact Processes. The systems through which people decisions get made, reviewed, and sustained.
2. Impact Positions. The roles where weakness, vacancy, or missing successor depth creates disproportionate risk.
3. Impact Players. The incumbents and successors capable of carrying the organization forward.

IP3 answers the location question: which processes matter, which positions create the greatest exposure, and which people the business can count on.

The second model manages the risk over time. I call it the Leadership Continuity Framework™, and it runs on four pillars, each built around one question:

1. Exposure. Where are we vulnerable?
2. Calibration. What is the truth about our current bench?
3. Readiness. What are we doing to close the gaps?
4. Cadence. How do we know the system is working?

Keeping the two jobs separate matters in practice. I have sat with teams that knew exactly which positions carried the risk and had no discipline for testing the bench behind them. I have also seen a polished succession process run over the wrong roles. Both feel like progress right up until a critical role opens.

Neither model runs itself. The work behind them is heavy; it never really finishes, and it lands squarely on the executive team.

What the two models earn together is a different starting position. IP3 identifies where people risk lives. The Leadership Continuity Framework manages that risk over time. An organization that has done both is not learning where it is exposed on the day the exposure becomes real.