Flowcon online 2020
Organisations are incentivised to adopt maturity models (sometimes also disguised as frameworks) when seeking to improve on their capabilities. A major reason for their popularity is that they provide a context-free assessment of people’s abilities, which empowers people in authority to make judgments about other people’s capabilities without a need to acquire such capabilities themselves or taking their context into account. Maturity Models also tempt the executive because they describe a target culture as an idealised future state.
Maturity models can be successfully adopted if the practitioners have insight into how the model can be contextualised for the current environment, how it fits into the current culture and that ability of contextualising is more critical to the adoption than depth of expertise in the model.
This talk introduces Maturity Mapping, a practice of applying Social Practice Theory (SPT) using Wardley Mapping in order to guide organisational transitions by enabling contextualisation for the adoption of capabilities. It is not only an antidote to maturity models, but shifts the focus of improvement away from who we are (investigation of individuals’ inner lives) to what we do (investigation of socio-technical interactions of collectives). Maturity Mapping allows us to visualise what we need to do and learn to execute a strategy, as well as informing what strategy options exist in our current context.
While Maturity Mapping is philosophically motivated and theory lead, the talk will explain the practice by showing examples of where it has enabled better outcomes.