Across several pieces of work with Kerry Foods, a common design challenge appeared: how do you turn concepts such as purpose, potential and high performance into language that managers can genuinely use?
One strand involved a manufacturing leadership team examining its collective purpose. Rather than beginning with a corporate wording exercise, participants interviewed colleagues from different sites and functions about moments when they had felt proud, energised and committed — and about the future they most wanted Kerry Foods Pastry to create.
The stories were then brought together and mined for patterns. Purpose emerged from people’s experience and aspiration rather than being handed to them as a statement to endorse.
The same philosophy informed later work on talent. Kerry Foods wanted leaders to distinguish more confidently between current performance and future potential without becoming trapped by labels or overly complex talent models. MJA designed masterclasses in which leaders explored the evidence, reflected on their own career experiences and worked with realistic examples of people performing under different conditions.
The process deliberately sought Kerry’s own everyday language for the markers of potential: what managers actually notice when someone is learning quickly, moving outside their comfort zone, building trust or demonstrating the capacity to operate at a different level. Leaders also considered how people in different parts of the performance–potential matrix needed to be managed and developed.
In both strands, the organisation already contained much of the wisdom needed. The development process helped leaders surface it, test it and create shared meaning around it.
The resulting frameworks were useful because managers could recognise real people and real work inside them. They supported judgement without pretending to replace it.