How I think about: Organisational Maturity

Introduction

This is a third post in my ‘How I think about…’ series. If you are interested, feel free to read my previous posts about Uncertainty and Productivity respectively. In this article I hope to illustrate what the concept of organisation maturity means to me, why it matters, what antipatterns I often observe and how growing maturity translates into superior business outcomes.

In the business (and especially IT) context, over the last 20 years a lot has been written on the topic of maturity. CMMI was (Or still is? Anyone still using it?) one of the ‘foundational’ maturity models many organisations adopted during the 1990s. Many agile ‘frameworks’ these days come with some kind of maturity model (including Kanban which, as a community, resisted the idea of a maturity model for a long time) and, of course, there’s a myriad of de-facto proprietary (agile) maturity frameworks and models developed by various organisations, consulting firms and communities. Some are helpful, some are useless, some are effectively harmful.

This post is not about any specific model or framework, or a specific implementation of a given maturity model, its pros and cons. Instead, I will focus on the concept of maturity as such (more precisely growing maturity) and how the way maturity growth is approached influences the overall outcomes at a team and organisational level. Going forward, I will use the term maturity as a generic term for both team and organisational maturity.

What is maturity?

There are, of course, many ways how one can define and think about maturity. In the context of this article I define maturity as follows:

Organisational maturity is a measure of organisation’s ability to attain complex objectives optimally.

I appreciate this may not be how you think about maturity but please bear with me. The key word in this definition is optimally. And by achieving objectives optimally I mean achieving them in the best possible way which integrates a range of organisational priorities and considerations both in the short- and the long-term. There are naturally many aspects that matter, but a couple of examples to bring this to life — an organisation that launches a new product in a record time, but with a series of major security flaws is not mature. Similarly, an organisation whose overly rigid controls and processes prevent it from innovating and create customer and business value at pace is not very mature either.

We can see that, on this definition, maturity requires holistic thinking. And that’s because achieving outcomes optimally requires a good understanding of what factors influence success, what matters to us, what is the hierarchy of these factors, which of them are specific to us and which pertain to the world around us and how we intend to balance them when we are facing tough choices. Only with this in mind, we can start thinking about how we ought to structure our maturity approach, what dimensions it should have, what qualities and factors we optimise for and how this relates to our understanding of success. At this point, using one of the existing models is a good way to stimulate the conversation about all these aspects and examine them from different perspective but be wary on converging on a specific model/framework too soon.

Finally, we ought to recognise that the term (organisational) maturity integrates a range of areas some of which are independent while others are deeply intertwined. Therefore, when we speak about maturity, I really refer to a collection of components including technical (software engineering, architecture etc) maturity, operational maturity, product delivery maturity, financial, governance and process maturity etc.

Crucial point to note — please note that ‘mature’ on my definition does not automatically imply comprehensive, complex, or all-encompassing. Instead, being mature really refers to the overall level of a set of organisational capabilities and as needed (their fitness for purpose) to succeed in the relevant context and market.

Organisational vs. Team Maturity

Organisations usually contain a set of smaller sub-units. Some sub-units can be fairly large (division, department), others can be smaller (team) and others smaller still (individual). When thinking about maturity, we need to carefully consider the remit of our efforts and understand which elements are best tackled at team-level and which are really a departmental or organisational concern. Failing to recognise this difference leads to one or more of the antipatterns listed later.

Why maturity matters

So why is maturity relevant? Why should we really care? And to what extent is focusing on growing maturity justified? A lot of the answers are, of course, related to what we care about. Your approach to growing maturity is, at its heart, about your approach to continuous improvement. Increasing maturity is about investing in continuous improvement across (typically) several dimensions and on multiple levels. How mature is ‘mature enough’ really depends on your definition of optimal and success.

What are the consequences of creating a highly mature organisation? As the definition I suggested above implies, it means such organisation will be really good at attaining its goals optimally. In practice, any highly mature organisation will be very effective in things like:

• creating value for its employees, shareholders, and customers in a sustainable way

• balancing short-term needs and long-term strategic priorities

• responding and adapting to change (externally and internally induced) rapidly

• developing services and products that solve real-world problems and/or create new markets and opportunities

• maintaining healthy balance sheet and profitability

• etc.

These are all highly desirable traits that most organisations care about and that is why growing maturity (as one of the core elements of a continuous improvement mindset) is such a critical element of creating success.

Antipatterns seen way too often

Too much or too little

As with most things, there’s a range of antipatterns that organisations and teams can (mostly unknowingly) fall into. One that probably happens most often is a failure to balance investment in maturity wisely. In most cases this has the form of dedicating too little time and effort to growing maturity. This usually stems from a lack of understanding of the current level of maturity (typically due to being overly optimistic or outright deluded) and tends to be coupled with a culture that is big on hubris and small on introspection and open feedback. This is especially lethal as it tends to produce a gradual and hard-to-revert organisational decline. Usually, such organisations realise there’s a major problem only when it’s too late to do something about it without drastic and painful measures. In extreme cases this leads to the organisation going out of business due to lack of competitiveness and failures in operational capability.

The other variant of this antipattern (i.e., ‘doing too much’) tends to be quite rare and usually has a form of trying to grow maturity in places where only marginal impact on overall org performance can be achieved. It basically means chasing more and more improvement in some capability even though such an improvement cannot translate to a correspondingly large business advantage.

The ‘We will do it later’ fallacy

This antipattern is different from the first one in that the organisation is (largely) aware of the need to grow maturity in one or more areas or disciplines but is unable or unwilling to commit the time, effort and investment needed to do so. Usually, the reasoning behind this stance goes as roughly follows: “We recognise that we have major deficiencies in area X, but addressing these would divert capacity, attention, and resources away from delivering our project/service/product/feature. We cannot afford to do this now as delivering on time is essential. We will, however, invest in improvement at a later stage once this project/service/product/feature is delivered. Then we will have more time and breathing space to focus on improving maturity.”

This is typically a fallacy and that’s due to several factors. Here are some of the main ones:

• As long as the org exists and as long as it aims to remain competitive, there will always be another project/product/feature to deliver. Therefore, there will never be an ‘optimal’ time to start focusing on growing maturity as the ‘We will do it later’ argument can always be invoked.

• Things almost always take longer than we hope. As a result, what may seem like only few weeks/months until our project/product/feature is done can very easily turn into a much longer period. This then creates more pressure to ‘catch up’ which, in turn, makes it even less likely to find time to grow maturity.

• Growing maturity is, by the very definition, about increasing the organisation’s ability to succeed — to attain its objectives optimally. The lower the maturity, the harder it is to succeed. Delaying focus on maturity improvements means that whatever we are doing now is going to be progressing more slowly, with greater risk and less optimally than it could. And whist this may indeed be justified in some scenarios (e.g., when completion of some business-critical initiative is less than few weeks away), in most cases it only means that the thing (project, product, feature etc.) we care about and we have been working so hard on continues to be affected by our immaturity for longer and longer.

Tools and frameworks over outcomes

When thinking about maturity, it is tempting to just pick one of the ready-made maturity models (typically linked to and packed-with specific agile, lean or software delivery and digital ‘frameworks’) and use it as a complete and optimal source of truth and wisdom. Plus, people love check lists. Working towards a set of clearly defined criteria seems like a sensible strategy to grow maturity.

There are real dangers in adopting a maturity model of any kind blindly though. When the model we choose to follow does not match our organisational context, we will not get good outcomes. When we don’t understand what our maturity is today and where we are starting from, we will likely pick the wrong model, focus on the wrong things, and end up in a place that’s far from optimal. When we focus on driving adherence to a specific model and measure success predominantly in terms of model/framework adoption, what we will get is indeed a superficial adoption of a chosen model but usually without the business outcomes we were hoping for.

If we choose to use a specific maturity framework/model, we can’t allow it to dominate the conversation. Instead, it should act as a sort of a guide to enable, encourage, and focus our conversations on things that really matter and that will make a difference to our team and organisational maturity in our context and given our ambitions.

Local optimisations

Local optimisation is a well-known phenomenon from many disciplines from Lean to Systems Thinking. In the context of our discussion here it takes the form of focusing our maturity growth initiatives only on specific, often fairly narrow areas and failing to recognise that we need to look at a system as whole.

A typically example is an over-emphasis on growing team level maturity and obsessing about specific elements of team performance (also see How I think about: Productivity) without noticing that the end-to-end organisational performance may much more be determined by factors that happen ‘outside’ of a team, for instance how work is prioritised, how funding is allocated, how governance works, what controls are used and how, how are incentives aligned etc.

Another example is a situation when organisations focus on growing maturity in areas where they feel they can do so most easily, rather than in areas what they ought to do it most urgently. This may not be an entirely unreasonable position to take, but it does mean that we are giving up on a much larger opportunity to make an impact.

Whilst very common, of the four antipatterns covered in this section, Local Optimisation is arguably the one that ought to be easiest to correct. After all, an organisation that focuses a lot on local optimisation must, at least to some degree, have a continuous improvement mindset and a willingness to invest in maturity. A correction in this context therefore means directing more of organisation’s resources to areas and aspects where maturity growth will yield greatest benefit. This needs to start with establishing a shared understanding of the end-to-end challenges and constraints the organisation is dealing with. Value Stream Mapping is only one of the techniques that can help identify such constraints and then inform where and how maturity growth efforts should be directed.

So, what’s the catch?

If increasing maturity is such a good deal, why don’t all organisations invest more in it? In fact, why don’t we spend most of our effort on growing maturity all the time? As many things in life and in business it comes down to trade-offs. On one hand, as we have seen above, we have strong incentives to want to grow org and team maturity. On the other hand, we often do not have the time to wait until some high level of maturity is reached as we need to act (or deliver something) now. We want to get better, but we have deadlines to meet and products to deliver. And some of the maturity improvements will take months (if not years) to achieve which means we need to find a balance.

How do we resolve this conundrum? The best way to think about it is in terms of Polarities. I find Polarity Thinking (you can read a simple primer e.g., on the Sloww website) quite helpful in situations like this. In a nutshell, growing maturity (or continuous improvement) and ‘getting things done now’ is not a problem to solve, but a polarity to manage. We need to try to get stuff done AND, at the same time, grow our maturity. And we need to do it without continuously flip-flopping between positive and negative sides of both ‘poles’. Doing this well means that growth in maturity enables, supports, and accelerates the product/service/value creation efforts of the organisation without unwanted side effects.

How to grow maturity in practice

If you managed to make it all the way to this point, I hope that by now I managed to make a strong case for focusing on team and organisational maturity growth as a key component of running a successful business. So how do we do this well? What are some of the ways to avoid the common antipatterns? What can we specifically do in practice to enable a sustained maturity growth? How can we manage this polarity effectively?

Know where you (really) are

As is often the case, the first step is to ground our thinking in empiricism. We need to be confident that we understand our current condition well enough.

Questions we ought to be asking ourselves are:

• Do we really understand what level of maturity exists in our organisation today? How do we know this this?

• How do we guard against hubris, organisational delusion, reality distortion bubbles and other biases driven by past decision, political influences, power dynamics etc?

• How do we ensure we have an open, honest and safe conversation about status quo?

• What data can we use to corroborate or challenge our qualitative understanding?

Decide what you are aiming for

Assuming we do have a decent understanding of where we are now, we now need to determine what good looks like in our context (perhaps with a help of one or more existing models) and which elements of the ‘organisational landscape’ we will focus on and why. This is not trivial as it is tempting to try to boil the ocean and spread ourselves way too thinly. Not everything can be a priority. Not everything matters in the same way, at the same time and to the same degree. Tough choices need to be made.

At this point we need to be able to link the anticipated growth in maturity to a set of outcomes we are hoping to achieve and a set of indicators that will give us confidence that we are on the right path.

Some questions we should be asking here are:

• Which areas do we need to focus on and why?

• What outcomes do we hope to achieve?

• What level of change/improvement/maturity growth do we feel we need and why?

• How will we measure success?

• What is the first step we can take in each area?

• What are the main organisational, cultural, structural, process and technical obstacles in our way? How do we eliminate them?

Determine what’s needed to get there

The next step might then be determining the scale of investment, priority and focus our maturity growth strategy will require. This is, of course, context specific and the answer will be different in different parts of the organisation and when talking about different aspects of maturity. But being explicit about it and having a clear, ideally data-driven reasoning for our position is vital. It enables us to then tailor next steps accordingly and limit the risk of local optimisations.

Questions we might ask here are:

• What is the investment (time, money, people etc.) we ought to be prepared to make?

• How do we ensure this investment is available and will be sustained for as long as is needed?

• Where do we need a ‘short & sharp’ action and where do we need go ‘slow & steady’?

• Which elements of our maturity strategy are team-driven, and which require a broader change/focus/support?

• How will senior stakeholders actively support these efforts in practice?

Make it happen

Finally, we need to take clear steps to enable maturity growth to happen. After all, execution really matters and if we can’t establish an environment within which our ambitions can realistically be achieved, our efforts will fail. In practice, this may mean many things including:

• changing how our backlogs look like and what our teams are focusing on

• changing our product roadmap

• stopping or delaying existing initiatives to create space of maturity-focused work

• changing existing and developing new incentives for people, teams, and leaders

• changing what and how we celebrate and recognise

• developing policies to ensure that an appropriate level of funding and focus on maturity growth is always in place

• reviewing what we measure, how and why

• making organisational and leadership changes

• tailored communication to establish visibility of our efforts

• changing what we measure and how

Conclusion

It is my strong belief, that most organisations under-value the importance and the benefits of maturity growth and, as a result, do a rather poor job at it. Making trade-offs between value here and now and (much higher value) in the future is challenging. Saying ‘No’ to things we really want in order to create space to drive maturity growth can be painful. Yet, growing maturity in the right way is one of the most impactful organisational capabilities.

Being successful in this endeavour requires a strong alignment and commitment at a leadership level, strong cultural foundations, taking a longer-term outlook, adopting systems thinking mindset and, of course, passionate individuals throughout the organisation who are able and willing to drive maturity growth whilst maintaining balance between building new things and making things better at all times. Luckily, getting it right pays off handsomely in the form of great competitiveness in the market, ability to innovate at pace, operational excellence, engaged people and long-term viability and prosperity of the business. In my mind, these are good enough reasons to think very carefully and in depth about organisational maturity and build it into the fabric of the organisation and to be bold in directing organisational resources to drive maturity growth.

PS: Found an error? Or a typo? Did I get something wrong? Or do you have an idea you’d like to share? Please let me know!

How I think about: Uncertainty

This is part one of a series of posts focused on a range of topics, concepts and ideas that, in my experience, significantly influence the level of overall success in any organisation. Some posts will be more about specific practices and approaches while others, like this one, will be more conceptual and aimed at creating a foundational understanding and a basic mental model of a specific idea. In this post, I hope to provide a perspective on the phenomenon of uncertainty and its different flavours and introduce some basic concepts and approaches which help to navigate uncertainty in business and in life.

The urge to ‘know’

As humans, we like to know. We like to feel we are in control. We want to know that we are in charge of our destiny — be it in our personal lives or in the context of the organisation we are part of. And we go to extraordinary lengths to reduce uncertainty. We analyse and compare scenarios, we devise intricate plans, and we identify and manage risks. We do all these things and more in a hope that we will reduce or ideally eliminate the uncertainty. And yet, despite all this effort, we continue to be surprised by what actually happens and how difficult it is to be truly ‘in control’ in reality.

The human desire to be certain, to be in control is natural and it stems from our evolutionary history. Being able to reduce uncertainty and predict the outcomes of our actions or decisions would be hugely valuable. In many areas of life, we pay experts to help us reduce uncertainty (think investment bankers, financial advisors, pollsters, political advisors etc.). Some people even pay charlatans to make them at least feel that they ‘know’ (think astrologers, psychics, fortune-tellers etc). And most of us spend money to reduce possible negative impacts of uncertainties in life (think insurance).

We crave certainty because the feeling of being uncertain is something deeply uncomfortable, distressing and altogether undesirable. It creates anxiety, makes decision-making harder, and forces us to keep changing our plans. Uncertainty can be so uncomfortable that we are prepared to fool ourselves into feeling confident or certain about something even if such feeling is not grounded in any meaningful data or evidence (think most religions). Moreover, an uncontrolled quest for certainty resulting in holding one’s opinions too strongly hinders progress, impedes innovation, perpetuates falsehoods, ignorance and injustice and shuts down conversations (think religious or cultural dogmas, Taylorism applied to knowledge work, superstitions, creationism etc.)

In a nutshell, feeling uncomfortable with uncertainty is very human. And while working effectively towards reducing uncertainty is logical and can be hugely advantageous in life and business, our discomfort with uncertainty can and does often lead to waste and creates real-world harm. Getting good at living with, managing and exploiting uncertainty, therefore, makes a lot of sense.

Where does uncertainty come from?

Uncertainty is all around us. The more you look, the more uncertainty you will find. In fact, even events that we normally tend to consider ‘certain’ (the sun will rise tomorrow) carry a degree of uncertainty. So where does all this uncertainty come from? At the most basic level, uncertainty is both a physical property of the universe (e.g., quantum mechanical events that can only be described in probabilistic terms) and of human society and the world we live in (e.g., moral uncertainty about what is the right thing to do in a given situation or the impossibility to practically anticipate all effects of all our actions). As we shall see later, while some uncertainties can be reduced, others can’t.

In a business context, uncertainties are inherent to running a business and, as such, they have many forms — political, economic, social, structural, financial, organisation, technical etc. As a result, businesses spend billions on dealing with uncertainty. Yet, in many cases, a lot of this investment is wasted and yields zero or even negative value.

Types of uncertainty

It’s important to recognise that there are several distinct types of uncertainty and dealing with each type of uncertainty requires a different approach and a different mindset. In addition, not all uncertainties can be meaningfully reduced or eliminated, some not even in principle.

The main types of uncertainty include:

• Epistemic uncertainty — being uncertain due to a lack of knowledge or understanding e.g., I am uncertain about the colour of the t-shirt my son is wearing today

• Aleatory uncertainty — being uncertain in principle e.g., when flipping an (ideal) coin, I am uncertain if I will get heads or tails.

• Ontological uncertainty — different parties in the same interactions have different conceptualisations about what kinds of entities inhabit their world, what kinds of interactions these entities have and how the entities and their interactions change as a result of these interactions.

• Semantic uncertainty — different participants in the same interactions giving different meanings to the same term, phrase and/or actions. The words and concepts that we are using are inadequate to describe what we are trying to explain.

In the case of epistemic uncertainty, if we gain more information (e.g., by doing research, taking more measurements, conducting tests etc) the uncertainty can be reduced.

Aleatory uncertainty, on the other hand, is irreducible in that there will always be variability in the underlying variables. These uncertainties are characterised by a probability distribution and need to be dealt with as such.

Ontological uncertainty is about different people (teams, organisations, social groups) having different mental models about the state of the world, and/or different perception of how cause and effect work in the given context.

Semantic uncertainty, similarly to Ontological uncertainty, results in communication and interaction issues, confusion, misunderstanding and conflict as people talk cross-purposes. The latter two types of uncertainty can be reduced e.g. by explicit definition of terms, their meaning and public ‘validation’ of these terms to create a shared language and taxonomy across a team or an organisation. One should also openly examine and discuss existing perceptions and mental models that different parts of the organisation have (e.g. using Causal Loop Diagrams and other techniques) and seek a common interpretation.

In organisations, we encounter all four types of uncertainty regularly, yet we rarely think more deeply about what type we are dealing with, and if and how can it be effectively reduced. Way too often we implicitly assume that all our uncertainties are epistemic in nature.

Finally, uncertainty is, of course, very closely related to the concept of complexity. Highly complex systems, organisations, processes, and interactions often tend to create or amplify existing uncertainty as relationships between cause and effect are unclear and emergent and most actors have only a limited understanding of the system as a whole. In such systems, most actions have a range of second, third and higher-order consequences some of which are highly uncertain. Meaningfully reducing such uncertainty often requires a more fundamental rethink of the organisational model, process, structure, technology, the flow of work or other core ‘properties’ of the system as a whole and reducing the overall complexity.

What can we do?

Organisations need to get much better at embracing uncertainty.

By ‘embracing’, I specifically mean taking steps to:

• recognise when a specific uncertainty exists

• understand the nature of the uncertainty

• clearly describe its nature and properties and carefully think about them

• assess the cost AND the value of reducing/eliminating the uncertainty

• where it is meaningful, effectively reduce the uncertainty (but only to the extent warranted by the cost/value analysis)

• establish a culture and technological, organisational, structural, and systemic capabilities which enable working effectively in the presence of uncertainty and respond to change

• create and foster organisational ’antifragility’ on multiple levels

“Not to be absolutely certain is, I think, one of the essential things in rationality”

— Bertrand Russell

The above should be read less as a checklist and more as a set of practices, qualities and organisational traits — a mindset about uncertainty. In this context, I would like to emphasise that reducing uncertainty comes at a cost. To reduce the level of uncertainty, we will need to invest time, effort, money, and other resources. This, of course, promises a reward in a form of greater confidence, better predictability, or more optimal and less risky decisions. However, it also comes at a cost which can be very significant. Way too often costs of reducing uncertainty remain hidden and are not explicitly talked about. This can result in an excessive (and ultimately futile) focus on uncertainty reduction (e.g., through more analysis, planning, detailed specifications etc) even though a focus on organisational, technical and process changes enabling effective uncertainty management and real organisational responsiveness/adaptability/agility would have been a much smarter and more productive strategy. Finding the balance is hard and, as is often the case, it all starts with the right conversation.

In practice, there are many ways, tools and techniques which enable us to work with uncertainty better. Context, as always, matters but, in general, when navigating uncertainty I find ideas like the Cynefin framework, Bayesian inference, Decision Theory (including basic concepts like Minimax, Maximin), Systems thinking, and Probabilistic forecasting very useful. When used in the right way with the right level of understanding of the uncertainty we are dealing with and the overall system or area we operate within, these approaches yield remarkable results and enable us to fundamentally change the conversation and the way we look at dealing with uncertainty.

Uncertainties, like taxes, are here to stay. Trying to completely eliminate them or ignore them is dangerous, can be very costly (and futile) and leads to bad outcomes in the long term. Uncertainties also create opportunities. Exploiting these opportunities requires teaching ourselves to live with, embrace and take advantage of uncertainties around us. It means getting comfortable with the discomfort, thinking more deeply about the uncertainties we need to work with and reframing the conversation we are having. Organisations that embrace uncertainty tend to reliably outperform those that don’t — both in the short and the long run. Good luck!

PS: Found an error? Or a typo? Did I get something wrong? Or do you have an idea you’d like to share? Please let me know!