organizational maturity and how to age gracefully

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“It`s not how old you are, it`s how you are old.”

Jules Renard

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So.

Let’s say your business has made it through the Gartner Hype gauntlet. Somehow you have made it past the early adopters and have some effective audience of mainstream <laggards if you want to use ‘model-speak’> that keep the business a viably healthy profitable business.

Well. Suffice it to say all companies mature <assuming they don’t die a young death>. From that point on you either decide to age gracefully or figure out how to retain your boyish <girlish> charm.

Uhm. But you have to figure it out while living in a business world of constant change that disrupts not only how you may decide to market yourself but the whole industry you are competing in. The dilemma every business faces is whether such a rapid pace of acceleration can be maintained in terms applying new trends to day to day practices thereby staying relevant … without losing what got you to that place in the first place.

Or maybe better said — how many and what should be applied to incorporate enough to be relevant.

Or, most simplistically, what to pay attention to and what to ignore.

Unsurprisingly once you make it past the Gartner hype gauntlet you immediately run into more 2 dimensional linear models this time outlining organizational maturity. organizational maturity Characteristics_of ModelI have the same gripes with these models as I did with the Hype Cycle <as well as one additional huge gripe I will outline later> however I end up in the same place in that if you use the model as a thinking tool and not a plan-o-gram you should be fine.

I do believe data and digital tracking tools offer unprecedented opportunities to implement the  creative thinking needed to ‘not die’ <i.e., lose relevance>. And I do believe at the end of the day it is inevitably be the combination of insights and some creativity that will translate actions into some meaningful outcome.

However.

While I flippantly suggested how to stay relevant there are gobs of researched models that reflect how poorly most organizations mature.

Most companies either remain stagnant <because they are hesitant to change what got them through the Gartner gauntlet> or overreach expectations <try and change too much>. Either way they get captured in standard maturity models.

Ok. Most maturity models reflect stair steps reflecting the four or five stages that organizations progress through <or should progress through> in developing a certain capability along a number of dimensions as they mature.

I have several issues <gripes> with most organizational maturity models:

organizational maturity trap1. They suggest maturity is inevitable <which I do not agree with>

2. They suggest, in some for or fashion, an organization life is finite <which I do not agree with>

3. They typically suggest each stage advances on all dimensions of the model  which elevates every aspect of the company’s “maturity” further and further into some new heights <which I cannot agree with>

4. They suggest a business should always want to move up to the next stage … and manage to the next stage <which I do not agree with>.

 

Assuming you have maneuvered your way through the Gartner Cycle and you have a franchise of existing customers you actually have lots of options.

 

–          Mature gracefully?

–          Maintain some youngish immature charm?

–          Create a new version of yourself?

 

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“Just because you’re grown up and then some doesn’t mean settling into the doldrums of predictability. Surprise people.“

Victoria Moran

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Pick anyone you want … but suffice it to say moving to the next stage may not be the right thing to do. There is a cost to everything, and advancing into the highest levels of a maturity model may have diminishing returns or even negative returns for you. That said. My biggest gripe with these models is the assumption that you want to organization to ‘step up’ over time.

Well.

I imagine that real maturity is discovering which stage is optimal for your business, or even mixing attributes from different stages — resisting the narrow-framing of a fixed set of homogenized stages <that were likely created with a specific industry or set of assumptions>. The most generic version of a maturity model is the up-and-to-the-right graph. These graphs which emphasize up-and-to-the-right, i.e., ‘do more of X, get more of Y’ is … well … simplistically nuts.

Yes.

We all aspire to more. More sales, more leads, more customers, more revenue, more profit, more and, suffice it to say, if there is a possible positive business result … you want more of it. And, yes, all are great but everything has a cost even if it’s just opportunity cost. The pursuit of more without considering what those costs are leads to some form of the absurd <it doesn’t lead to taking over the world>.

Bottom line.organizations mature

Just because the line on the graph can go higher and further to the right doesn’t necessarily mean you should chase it there at the expense of other dynamics that aren’t represented on that graph.

Ah. Expense of what <you may ask>.

It could be that as a company matures they lose alignment on what Peter Drucker referred to as the commitment to ‘contribution.’

 

Contribution for every organization needs performance in three major areas: (i) direct results (ii) building values and their reaffirmation (iii) building and developing people for tomorrow. If deprived of performance in any one of these areas, it will decay and die. 

maturity cultural alignment-maturity-model-4-4Direct results always come first. In the care and feeding of an organization, they play the role calories play in the nutrition of the human body. But any organization also needs a commitment to values and their constant reaffirmation, as a human body needs vitamins and minerals. There has to be something ‘this organization stands for’ or else it degenerates into solely results generation which permits disorganization, confusion and ultimately paralysis. Value commitments, like results, are not unambiguous in that an organization can waver between two fundamentally incompatible value commitments <which is not optimal> and yet be functional.

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Lastly. People. An organization is a means of overcoming the limitations mortality set as to what any one person can contribute. An organization that is not capable of perpetuating itself has failed. Therefore an organization has to provide today the people who will, and can, run it tomorrow. An organization that just perpetuates today’s level of vision, excellence and accomplishment has lost the capacity to adapt. And since the one and only thing certain is change it will not be capable of survival in a changed tomorrow.

 

Those are pragmatic aspects if ignored do not allow an organization to shift in the steps in the model nor permit it to rest, and prosper, at any step.

Ah. Yes. A real business truth is that a company may not move at all — as in ‘step up’ in the model — and that may be a good thing.

Regardless. Organizations should look at a maturity model with some skepticism and pragmatism. Certainly with some hesitance to grow old before its time, some common sense, a holistic cost/benefit thinking to maximize success at any step and more risk taking.

Oops. Did I just type risk? <yes>.

Adapting means risk. To be clear. Stagnancy <or not adapting> is not risk. It is death <failure>.

Now. Today’s business world.

A broad range of U.S. economists agree that a specific and necessary kind of risk-taking is on the decline. Historically, risk-taking that supports high rates of churn, lots of hiring and firing, company formation and destruction, gives economies more flexibility to adapt to changing markets. If risk taking is down that means adapting is down which means organizational maturity will be down <because they will die young> and older organizations will become bigger and more stagnant <look old>.

Some information that feeds into adaptation and risk:

 

Americans have long taken pride in their willingness to bet it all on a dream. But that risk-taking spirit appears to be fading. In doing some research <beyond the fact Americans are taking less business risk> … risk-taking seems more concentrated than years past, by industry and by region, said Dane Stangler, director of research and policy at a nonprofit that studies entrepreneurship.  “We absolutely see geographic divergence,” he said. “We’ve got these hotbeds of startups, but you just don’t see the same level of activity in other areas of the country.” 

Fewer Americans are changing jobs. Companies are hoarding more cash. And the proportion of new businesses has fallen. The result? A less dynamic economy. Three long-running trends suggest the U.S. economy has turned soft on risk: Companies add jobs more slowly, even in good times. Investors put less money into new ventures. And, more broadly, Americans start fewer businesses and are less inclined to change jobs or move for new opportunities.  The decline in risk-taking is reflected in U.S. migration: Americans move less often, with rates of interstate migration falling for at least 20 years, according to census data. They also have less workplace wanderlust: 53% of adults last year held the same job for at least five years, up from 46% in 1996, according to the Labor Department. The share of workers who voluntarily left their jobs in a given year plummeted to 16.1% in 2009 from 25.2% in 2006 and remains well below prerecession levels. 

Economists at the Federal Reserve Board of Governors found the falling rate of interstate migration over the long-term correlated strongly with the decline in job changes. In other words research shows that people are moving less because they are changing jobs less. The changes reflect broader, more permanent shifts, including an aging population and the new dominance of large corporations in many industries.

 

So. How does this affect the entire organizational maturity discussion? Companies that gamble on new ideas are more likely to fail but also more likely to have big success. Entrepreneurs face incredibly long odds but those that achieve success create jobs for many others. And entrepreneurs WITHIN existing organizations not only maintain jobs for many others but also create jobs within that organization.

Interestingly this lower risk taking is leading to the fact that there is a growing dominance of large corporations in nearly every industry this in turn makes it more difficult for new businesses and ideas to gain a foothold. For the first time since such records have been kept, the Census found in 2008 that more Americans worked for big businesses <those with at least 500 workers> than small ones.

The trend has continued since.

Regardless.

All organizations do mature if they make it through the Gartner Hype Gauntlet. But that is simply in years. And years of maturity is significantly different that being an old company.

 

‘Age’ is the acceptance of a term of years. But maturity is the glory of years.

Martha Graham

 

In the end.

A maturing organization pragmatically speaking is never a smooth process like any model makes it out to be. It is more like … well … a roller coaster ride. It looks that way mostly because to stay relevant an organizational culture and character needs to evolve. It mainly evolves by incorporating ‘tomorrow’s people aspects’ into maturity roller coaster of changetoday’s organization’ <as Drucker mentions>.

This kind of change & adaptation is never easy and rarely smooth. And maybe that is why I struggle with most organizational maturity models.

They make it look smooth.

They make it look like next steps up are inevitable.

They make it look like some planned life architecture.

They make it look naturally linear.

Common sense <and your own Life experiences> suggests that business cannot really work that way.

Well. Common sense is right. Managing a business into maturity in today’s world is challenging. If I were smarter I bet I could develop a 3 dimensional maturity model showing the traditional stages overlaid by all the adaptations that would need to constantly be occurring to insure relevance necessary to make it into maturity.

But I am not that smart. So just think about it.

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Written by Bruce