Why I Dislike Maturity Models

I’ve recently been hitting some client problems caused by their organisation’s approach to maturity models. So… time for a brief rant…

Maturity models are often framed like this:

1. A linear path from immature to mature
2. The start of the path is presented as “bad” (who wants to be “immature”?)
3. That linear path has an end

Which naturally encourages folk to view the “mature” end of the spectrum as aspirational. When I’ve seen organisations reach for maturity models it’s almost always been with the goal of moving to the “mature” end of the chart, because that end of the diagram is seen as “good”.

Which can be a problem — because all three of those points are at best oversimplifications, and at worst outright lies.

Maturity Isn’t Linear

Organisations are successful in lots of different ways. Organisations fail in lots of different ways. It’s rarely a linear path from one to the other.

For example — this is a pattern I’ve seen a few times.

1. A developer founded company has pretty darn effective development practice from day one — but sucks on the design side.
2. Then the development practice get less effective as the development work & customer base scales in ways the old practices cannot cope with.
3. At the same time the design practices improve radically as a couple of relatively low-status individuals grows into a small team with more senior design leadership.
4. Then the development practices improve as folk discover how to manage the work more effectively.
5. Then the design work grows too large for a single team to manage effectively — and the design side starts hitting trouble again…

What happened?

• Company size when small > medium > large
• Development effectiveness went good > bad > good
• Design effectiveness went bad > good > bad

There are dozens of variations on this kind of story. That nice simple journey from immature to mature almost never matches people’s real experiences.

Maturity of Practice & Size of Company Are Not the Same Thing

One of the things I dislike most about maturity models is the way many combine the small-to-large company dimension with the bad-to-good practice dimension .

SmallCo’s practices are not automatically immature because it only has a couple of dozen people in it.

LargeCo’s practices are not automatically mature because it has 50k employees.

A fifty person company is not an immature multinational in the same way a bicycle is not an immature airliner. If successful SmallCo adopted all the practices of successful LargeCo it would fail miserably. If successful LargeGo adopted all the practices of successful SmallCo it would fail miserably.

The things a organisation does to be impactful in a 50 person company and a 50k person company are just different — and that’s a good thing.

It’s not a maturity issue — it’s a context issue.

Small Is Not Bad & Large Is Not Good

Another terrible side effect of those dimensions being mashed together is a tendency to read in a value judgement.

You can only move from bad-practices/small-company to good-practices/large-company. Which means maturity models presented this way cannot answer questions like:

• What do good practices at smaller organisations look like?
• How do we move from one good place to another good place as an organisation grows?
• What do bad practices at larger organisations look like?
• How do we move from a bad place to a good place when the organisation is large?

The immature-to-mature metaphor means that folk tend to read the “immature” end of the model as “bad” — and the “mature” end of the model as “good”. Which is nonsense.

Cause and Effect Get Confused

What’s happening when folk try and drive practice adoption with a maturity model:

1. Does a company change because it adopts a particular practice?
2. Does a company adopt a particular practice because it has changed?
3. Was it a messy complicated combination of (1) and (2)?

Because of the immature-to-mature metaphor folk often wield maturity models as if only (1) or only (2) are true — when the real answer is usually closer to (3).

Only Dead Things Stop Maturing

Just because you’re ticking all the boxes of “mature” doesn’t mean:

• You cannot continue to improve
• You’re doing the things in those boxes well
• The context that makes those boxes relevant is likely to continue

Continual improvement is a thing! The work of making things better doesn’t finish. If your organisation is approaching a maturity model as a box ticking exercise you’re missing ways to improve.

So What Do We Do?

Before you start building or researching maturity models — articulate why you want one. Can you answer questions like:

• How are we going to be using it?
• What problem(s) are we trying to solve?
• What forces or context changes are creating those problems?
• How is understanding where we sit on a maturity model going to help us?
• How do we think changing where we sit on a maturity model is going to help us?
• How are we going to measure progress?
• What would success look like?

A theme that often pops out of conversations around these questions is “reassurance”. Folk want to know they’re doing “best practice” or “the right thing”. People want to be know that they’re not missing an obvious thing that their competitors are doing.

When this topic comes up (or “if” I guess, but it’s mostly a “when” in my experience) I’d encourage you to dig into why people are seeking it. There are often more fundamental issues — a nagging set of problems driving the need for reassurance.

Next, when you’re assessing maturity models, look for the assumptions built into the model — and figure out whether those assumptions align with how you want to use it:

• Are they combining organisation size and good/bad practice into a single dimension?
• Do they talk about what forces make adopting a practice successful or unsuccessful?
• Do they talk about the problems that adoption a practice solves — and what success or failure looks like?
• Look at where you are on a maturity model now — does your experience in getting where you are now match what’s on the model?

Questions like this can get discussion started about the forces and patterns that are driving change in your organisation. Which is often a vastly more useful nuanced discussion than the one that a simple linear maturity model delivers.

If you want some inspiration — take a look at:

• https://maturitymapping.com — a general framework for practice maturity that tries to make the conversation about context more explicit
• https://researchskills.net — a maturity model for user research practices that tries to make explicit the forces and patterns that drive adoption of practices in different context.
• http://www.agilefluency.org — especially the bit on losing fluency (thanks to Kristen Belcher for reminding me of this!)

TL;DR: There isn’t a single linear path from immature to mature. Immature does not mean bad. Cause and effect get confused. Maturity is not an end point.

ttfn.

Originally published at https://adrianhoward.com.