Maturity

Maturity assessment

You never pick a number.

Every dimension is a ladder, and every rung of it is a written statement about the world. You read down and stop at the highest one that is already true — the number comes with it. Which is why two people land on the same score, and why that score still means the same thing a year later.

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rung

/rʌŋ/

noun

1.

One of the crossbars of a ladder — the part you actually stand on. From Old English hrung, a rod or bar.

2.

Here: one written statement at one value on one dimension. “We have met the economic buyer at least once, introduced by our contact” is rung 3 of 5. A dimension is never scored out of five — it is placed on its highest rung that is already true, and the number is just that rung’s position on the ladder.

The next rung — the statement one value above the one that is true. Which is to say: the improvement, written down before anybody assessed anything.

Why assess maturity

You are already making these calls. Just not on the record.

Is the project healthy. Is the working environment good enough. Are the playgrounds worth what the municipality spends on them. Is the machine ready to ship. These get settled in meetings, from impressions, by whoever is surest of themselves — and then settled again next quarter from different impressions, with nothing to compare against.

A maturity assessment fixes the question before anyone answers it: a handful of dimensions, each a defined ladder, scored on a date. It does not make the judgement for you. It makes the judgement legible — to the people who disagree with it, and to whoever reads it next year.

Why this way

A rating measures the rater. A rung measures the thing.

Ask ten people to rate something one to five and you collect ten private definitions of four. The answers are real data — about the respondents. Average them and you have a decimal that nobody can act on, defend, or reproduce, and the review becomes an argument about the score instead of the subject.

Beaufort had the same problem. Sailors reported wind as fresh, or stiff, or a bit much, and no two agreed. He did not ask them to be more precise about the feeling. He wrote down what you would see: whitecaps form. Small trees sway. Slate comes off roofs. The observer stopped judging and started identifying, and a number that had been an opinion became a reading.

Every dimension here is built that way. The scale never asks how strong the wind feels.

Scored as a rating

3 / 5

Nothing is written on this scale, so every value means whatever the person holding the pen thought it meant. Ask a colleague and you get a 2. Ask again in October and nobody remembers what either of you was measuring.

Scored as a ladder

rung 3 of 5
  1. The economic buyer has not been identified.
  2. The economic buyer is named, but we have had no contact with them.
  3. We have met the economic buyer at least once, introduced by our contact.Already true
  4. The economic buyer has confirmed budget to us directly and stated their own success criteria.The next rung
  5. The economic buyer meets us on a recurring cadence and has personally sponsored the initiative internally.

You can be shown that rung three happened, or you cannot. Two people reading this ladder pick the same rung without negotiating — and rung four is what to do next, written before anyone opened the deal.

Same dimension, same deal, same afternoon. One of these you can be shown the evidence for.

Economic Buyer · Sales Opportunity Coaching

Four things you get once the statements are written down

Agreement stops being a negotiation.

Two people scoring the same subject are no longer trading numbers. They are asking one answerable question per rung: can you be shown this, or not? Disagreement moves onto evidence, where it can actually be settled.

The improvement was written before the assessment.

Because the ladder is ordered, the rung above the one that is true is the next thing to do — and it was in the framework before anyone scored anything. It is not advice produced after the fact, so it cannot be quietly rewritten into whatever was already planned.

A 3 keeps meaning what a 3 meant.

Across people, across subjects, across years. Movement between rounds is real movement, not drift in how strictly someone happened to be marking that day — which is what makes a trend worth drawing at all.

A score outlives its framework.

Every score keeps the statement as it read on the day it was given. Improve the wording next year and last year’s rounds still say what they said, so nothing has to be frozen in order to stay honest.

Where it applies

Anything you would otherwise have to take a view on.

The method does not care what is being assessed, only that someone is willing to write down what each rung looks like. Two frameworks ship written that way. The rest is yours — the ladder is the product, not the models.

Programme

Project health

Whether the project is on track, rather than reported as on track.

Organisation

Working environment

What the annual satisfaction score gives you an average of, but never a statement of.

Public sector

Facilities and grounds

Whether the playgrounds are maintained, not merely present and counted.

Ships with it

Manage

Score something you are actually working on.

No account to create. Start from a framework that ships, or write the ladder yourself — one dimension is enough to see whether the method holds. A subject is a link you can hand to whoever else is in the room.

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