Maturity level: where your organisation stands today

Before planning a route, it helps to know where you start. For this we have two different pictures, and because they are easily confused, their relationship is expressly clarified here. The eight areas of clarification from Chapter 5 describe what needs to be clarified; they are the substantive topics. The maturity level describes how far an organisation has come overall in clarifying and recording.

The two do not stand side by side but crosswise to each other. The areas of clarification say which topics you are working on. The maturity level says how far the organisation has already come in them overall. You work on all eight areas of clarification and grow through the maturity levels as you do so. In short: the areas of clarification are the What, the maturity level is the How far.

The maturity level is not a report card or a grade, but a map. Its only purpose is to determine the honest starting point and find the next sensible step.

Level 1: Person-dependent. The new succeeds because individual people carry it, and their knowledge sits in their heads. How quickly this can tip is shown by an image from practice: if a key person leaves, the knowledge can vanish within a short time because it was recorded nowhere. The next step is modest and effective: recording the most important knowledge for the very first time.

Level 2: Documented. First descriptions and templates emerge but are not yet applied the same way everywhere. The next step: turning scattered documents into a binding basis for everyone.

Level 3: Standardised. The approach and roles for undertakings are defined and apply to everyone. New people find their way faster. The next step: making the impact measurable.

Level 4: Measurable. It becomes transparent where the new is going well and where it stalls. Decisions rest on facts instead of assumptions. The next step: mapping the clarified and measured processes digitally in a targeted way.

Level 5: Digitally supported. Now the digital comes into play, and deliberately only here. At this point, digital does not yet mean anything grand, but simply: the knowledge is recorded and can be retrieved again. Systems reliably maintain the clarified processes and make the handling of the new traceable. Here digitalisation creates real benefit because it builds on an orderly basis.

Level 6: Self-learning. The highest level is often confused with mere digital aids, but it is something fundamentally different. A self-learning organisation does not just collect knowledge; it manages it. It keeps it free of contradictions and makes it available to everyone at any time in its context. Imagine information that flows seamlessly from the workplace to management, condensed and tailored to the respective context, so that good decisions become possible without anyone having to wade through hundreds of slides. That requires genuine knowledge management: recognising patterns, drawing conclusions, deriving principles from them for one's own next undertaking.

An organisation at level 2 gains nothing from the tools of level 5 as long as the intermediate levels are missing. That explains why so many system introductions disappoint: they anticipate a maturity that has not yet been achieved.

An honest limit belongs here. We prepare the way and reliably accompany an organisation into the range of levels 4 and 5, up to measurable and digitally supported handling of the new. The leap from the fifth to the sixth level, towards a truly self-learning organisation, requires further means and a development of its own that no single tool can deliver. We say this deliberately, because we only promise what we keep.

One pattern is encountered in many organisations. On the way until a decision reaches the top, individual participants build in their own interests and influence the decision in their direction instead of in the interest of the whole. The result is worse decisions, and it can be observed even in mature environments. However understandable this is in human terms, at its core it is a culture problem, a question of the Why, not of method.

And this is exactly where an important boundary runs: the Office does not work on an organisation's Why, nor on its base organisation. It is there for the new and is geared to a culture and base organisation assumed to be healthy. Where basic trust is missing, other paths are needed.

Chapter 8 shows how this pattern arises and why it persists so stubbornly. It belongs there because it is the reason why clarification so often stops halfway.