Kathy Harris

 Does maturity stifle innovation? Yes, if you’re a child. Yes, if you’re childlike. And yes (maybe), if you’re an organization hoping for maturity and innovation to co-exist.

We all love maturity models and assessments that help us understand what we should be doing and how well we’re doing it – the Cosmo quiz thrives in organizational management. But traditional maturity factors are focused on structured and control-oriented processes and activities. “Mature” implies that an organization has built the discipline and capabilities to achieve processes or activities that are “repeatable, reliable, predictable, measurable and continuously refined”.

But the winds of change are blowing through our workplaces. A modern workplace is filled with knowledge workers and their processes will mature along a different path. Modern work management will require some structured capabilities but they will need many more organic capabilities. And mature organic processes have different characteristics. Repeatability, for example, is less valued in knowledge work – the focus for knowledge work is on the quality of the outcome, not the steps taken to achieve it.

So what? So, we have a lot of rethinking to do.

• First, let’s rethink process design – should the emphasis on designing a reliable, predictable, repeatable, etc. process be replaced by a focus on enabling an employee or a customer to find the right information, select the right tools and connect with the right collaborators to accomplish a high-quality outcome?
  
• And, what about the fact that different people can take different steps yet achieve equally good outcomes?  Is productivity a new metric?
  
• Finally, what are appropriate factors and measures of maturity? Assessing adherence to a structured process appears to be less relevant than evaluating quality of outcomes. And, with an outcome-based process, do we have the opportunity to continually innovate how things are done, while in a repeatable process, the opportunity lies in taking time and people out of the process. Note that when we’re focused on taking time and people out of processes, we may not see a radical new way to achieve our outcomes. So, this seems to make a case for a new view of maturity.

Watch for more on these ideas. I know many of you feel the winds of change. Tell us about it.