To perform, organisations need the right capacity. In a relatively stable context, we can predict that capacity and build accordingly. In contexts of high complexity and radical change, what we will need to sustain and grow performance becomes much less certain. In such conditions, we do not necessarily even know what performance will entail. When we know what is coming, we can get the right skills and expertise in place. When we understand what performance is required, performance coaching may suffice. When we do not, something else is required.

What we do know is that we need to be prepared for being unprepared. We know that the thinking that created our troubles will not resolve them. We know that our go-to actions when crisis hits may make things worse, and that we need to find different places from which to act. We also know that relationships are not merely something we need to improve: our ability to come to terms with whatever unfolds will depend primarily on how we are able to relate.

We must develop a different kind of capacity – not only the outer capacity of skills and knowledge, but the inner capacity from which more appropriate thinking, feeling, and acting can arise.

The Maturity gap is the distance between the inner capacities a strategy requires and the capacities the organisation can currently bring to its execution. It is often the part of organisational capacity we do not see.

Rethinking capacity

We use the word capacity to refer to a volume or quantity: we have enough or not enough of it for whatever the organisation needs to do. This can mean people and resources. We also use the word to refer to a quality that enables organisational performance. We must have enough people – we know that. We must also have the right people: people with the right skills, knowledge, acumen, foresight, character, and so on.

A powerful way to approach this second view of capacity is through the lens of Maturity.

Maturity gives us a vertical perspective on the development of the human capacity of the organisation. This is in contrast to a horizontal view, which would include the right skills, knowledge, experience, and so on – what is called “talent” in the HR world.

The horizontal development of capacity is necessary as a baseline. If we have a law firm specialising in a certain field, and we face the “great problem to have” of growth, we need to make sure we have enough lawyers who specialise in that field, including senior lawyers with a lot of experience. We may even include in this horizontal view softer things such as culture fit and general character. Horizontal development supports stabilisation and the meeting of predictable needs.

But whatever issue we face in the organisation – growth, survival, complexity, change – the horizontal view can show us only part of the capacity required to resolve it. For this reason, I invite you to take a vertical view.

Vertical capacity

Maturation Theory describes human development as unfolding through successive stages of Maturity. Each stage represents an expansion of identity compared with its preceding stage. We also speak of the expansion of the individual’s inner world. Through maturation, our identities and inner worlds become more complex. Goethe wrote that we see in the world what we carry in our hearts. A more expanded and complex identity or inner world allows us to see and engage with a more complex outer world.

If I believe myself to be this – my identity – this belief is the limit of how I show up in the world. It enables me to a certain extent, and it also constrains me through what it excludes.

Take a government organisation that has set itself the goal of becoming more citizen-centric and agile. Agility requires high agency: I have to see what is required in the larger context of service provision, craft solutions that do not always strictly adhere to bureaucratic processes, and act responsibly. But I may have built my identity around fitting in and being no trouble, or around specialised knowledge of the bureaucratic system. That identity gives me certainty, control, and even some power; it also makes the unpredictability beyond my expertise difficult to enter. If enough of us share this wariness, the organisation remains resolutely bureaucratic.

This is not necessarily a matter of skill, character, or commitment. We know the job and want to be proud of our organisation; we simply tend to know that this new agile stuff will not work, because leadership does not understand how things work on the ground. What is to be done? How do we expand our identities to include being people who make an impact by claiming responsibility for resolving citizen issues through cross-functional collaboration as they arise?

This is what we mean when we speak of the vertical development of capacity. We expand our identities to include not only being someone who fits in and someone who is an expert, but also someone who makes an impact.

This is not a hierarchy of human worth. A later stage does not make someone a better or more valuable person, nor does resistance by itself tell us anything reliable about a person’s Maturity. People and systems draw on different logics in different contexts, and a stage attribution is a hypothesis to explore rather than a verdict to impose.

This expansion requires inner growth. Inner growth takes time, but we can support and accelerate it.

Creating vertical growth environments

The foundation for developing vertical capacity is a healthy culture. I have written about this in much more detail in Culture and Maturation: A developmental lens for organisational life.

Growth requires two elements: containment and safety, and stretch. If there is stretch without containment and safety, the chances are that many of us will regress to the point at which we feel best able to protect our sense of ourselves. This leads to an organisation that is anxiously stuck. If there is a great deal of containment but little stretch, the organisation becomes complacently stuck and unable to deal with shifts in context.

Maturation Theory tells us how we defend our identities through successive stages. We know this is a deep human need: I must feel that I am someone. To feel that I am someone, I hitch my sense of self to something that is valued in my world – at least in the conventional stages. For instance, my sense of self may be attached to belonging to a group. If I feel that my belonging is threatened or questioned, this raises my defences. My identity narrows: I am only this; this is what I can defend. I need a certain degree of safety to be not only this.

Here is what we need from the organisational culture to feel safe and contained enough not to become stuck in a defensive stage pattern, and the kind of heat or stretch we need to avoid becoming complacently stuck:

I heard the story of an acquisition in which a global firm took ownership of a local, well-loved niche luxury-goods brand. More than a year later, employees from the acquired company still introduced themselves as “I am So-and-So from Name of Old Company.” Their belonging to the old brand remained central. In mergers and acquisitions, a new basis for identification must be created that integrates and transcends the older identities.

This is not evidence that the employees themselves “are Conforming”. Their attachment may be a reasonable response to loss, poor integration, broken promises, or the destruction of something they valued. The stage lens helps us see which aspects of identity have been activated; it does not entitle us to diagnose the Maturity of the people involved.

Containment means acknowledging, valuing, and remembering the older identity rather than simply trying to replace it. Stretch becomes possible as belonging grows more secure: people can begin to identify as valued professionals whose expertise and contribution are not bounded by the old group. The new organisation cannot simply demand this shift; it must create the conditions in which it becomes possible.

The same principle applies after other forms of organisational trauma, including survival struggles, restructurings, and layoffs. Julia Kukard says that stuckness occurs when “the wound finds a salient context”. In one client organisation, the legacy of a long survival battle still catapults the management team into narrow, controlling behaviour whenever a challenge arises. Awareness allows them to shift their vigilance from the crisis to their response, and to hold one another accountable for staying open, realistic, and focused on their objectives. Sometimes you have to move through something literally.

The logics of inner capacity

Personality is one place where individual inner capacity becomes visible; culture is one place where collective inner capacity becomes visible. We infer both from recurring patterns. To say that we want to change culture or personality is nevertheless to grab the wrong end of the stick. Our work is not only to change outer behaviour, but also to develop the inner conditions out of which behaviour arises. It is like tending the soil rather than only shaping the plant. Pruning is necessary, but it is downstream.

Maturation Theory provides a compelling map. Its successive stages are “nested holons”, to use Ken Wilber’s terminology: each later stage includes and transcends the previous stages. The mechanism through which identity is constructed shifts across the stages – defensive in the conventional stages and balancing in the post-conventional stages – as what was subject becomes something we can hold as object. I wrote more about these core logics in Assessing Maturity: A point in time?

Each stage also brings specific thinking, feeling, and action logics: principles and capacities according to which we are able to act, feel, and think. Let me take you back to the government example.

Strategically, the government decided to become more agile and citizen-centric. This requires the logics of the Performing stage:

• I need to see, as a whole and across a longer strategic horizon, the larger system within which I operate, not just my role or siloed function. I need to see the organisation in relation to its clients (the citizens) and understand my role in its coherence and sustainability.
• I need to collaborate through influence – Peter Block’s idea of “positive politics” – rather than relying on conformity or system rules to compel cooperation. This requires psychological insight into myself and others.
• I need to act confidently and responsibly without waiting for permission. I can decide according to what is contextually necessary – not only what is permitted by system rules – and stand by or change the decision as required.

Agility requires a high degree of agency: the ability to see options, an orientation towards action, and a belief that action matters. At this stage, my focus is on “us” and what is good for us, not only on protecting my own sense of certainty. It means that I can deal with a fair degree of complexity without grasping for control. The question for any large bureaucracy is whether the strategic intent assumes capacities that only a minority of employees can currently use consistently.

The collective patterns we need to assess, rather than assume, may include:

• Groupthink, reflecting Conforming logic, and a high reliance on procedural and functional expertise – silos – reflecting Specialising logic.
• Strong local bonding and shared workplace moods, alongside the denial or rejection of feelings through reliance on reason.
• Avoidance of action not explicitly sanctioned by leadership, alongside action informed by system rules and directed towards keeping things under control.

These are capacities we cannot simply buy; they have to be developed. Although the introduction of certain key behaviours can enable shifts, it is not sufficient merely to introduce a set of “agile behaviours” or teach an “agile mindset”. To shift from “I must conform” to “I must understand and control” and then to “I can act interdependently to achieve impact” takes more than the introduction of new values – although a values shift is certainly at the heart of this transformation.

You see the gap between strategic intent and execution? Understanding the Maturity gap will reduce a great deal of unnecessary frustration among ambitious leaders.

It is not necessary to shift every employee immediately from Conforming to Specialising to Performing. Attention to the cultural conditions for growth is the foundation. Then we meet people where they are and support the healthy integration of the current centre-of-gravity logics. Conforming groups can expand the boundaries of inclusion and belonging; Specialising groups can bring reasoned attention to the domain of experience they repress, for example through work on emotional intelligence. Each stage holds healthy potential, and we work towards its release precisely where the group risks becoming stuck.

Action learning can create the necessary heat by confronting people with challenges in which old logics prove insufficient. In one university, Performing logic was becoming indispensable in dealing with changing student demographics, unpredictable funder behaviour, and internal political strife. We devised action-learning experiments in which leaders had to develop values-based organisation-development opportunities – a hot challenge for academics accustomed to the Specialising logics of research proposals, budgets, and committees.

To summarise an approach to working with gaps between stage logics when an organisation does not yet have the Maturity capacity to execute its strategy:

• A task for leadership is to understand and reflect on the inner capacity – the logics – required to execute the strategy. Realism here leads to wiser decisions and much less frustration.
• Understand the gap, particularly in critical areas. It is not necessary to change the entire culture at once. That is not possible anyway.
• Contain and stretch. Often our interventions are geared towards radical shifts; I want to urge practitioners to pay sufficient attention to the conditions that support growth in the first place.
• Meet people where they are. Understanding the collective centre of gravity is invaluable. Now we can help to integrate and heal where appropriate, and stretch and shift where feasible.

Small is beautiful

Does this sound like a long process? It depends on your frame. I have seen rapid change over very short periods. The requirement then is intensity, and work across different levels of the system: individuals, pairs, teams, and smaller leadership collectives.

Always keep in mind the OD principle of frame:

Scale: It is not necessary, or even possible, to change the larger system in which the system that matters to you is located. If a specific team matters to you, it is not necessary to change the whole department. If the relationship between two people on a team can be developed, it is not necessary to try to develop the whole team. Start with the smallest meaningful unit of performance – often a pair or small team.

Scope: You do not have to develop everything at once. Identify one or two small, desired shifts. Working towards these shifts may change your perspective on what is actually required. Be willing to adapt. In this way, development will unfold from what is working, and very soon you will observe cascades of shifts.

Laboratories, experiments, and practice fields

In conditions of high complexity, Cynefin practice suggests that we do not have the luxury of “betting the whole farm” on an intervention or initiative. Safe-to-fail experiments allow us to try something – with a clear theory of change and movement in the right direction rather than towards rigidly specified outcomes – see what happens, expand what works, and dampen what does not.

I have already mentioned the example of using action-learning experiments to create developmental heat. We can organise such efforts into internal development “laboratories” in which we test intense, fast-cycle development processes. The content of the work comes from the actual issues the organisation needs to resolve (the “dance floor”, so to speak). The “balcony” is the reflective space from which we develop self-reflective capacity, using the insights from maps such as the Enneagram and Maturation Theory.

The Maturity gap is not a judgement on the people in the organisation. It is a question about fit: what inner capacities does the strategy demand, which of those capacities are currently available, and what conditions will help more of them emerge? Once leaders can see that gap clearly, they can stop blaming people for failing to execute a strategy whose human requirements were never understood in the first place.

References

Block, P. (1987). The Empowered Manager: Positive Political Skills at Work. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Kukard, J. (2024). The Art and Joy of Stuckness for Coaches and their Clients. Abingdon: Routledge.

The Cynefin Co. (2024). Safe-to-fail probes.

Wilber, K. (1995). Sex, Ecology, Spirituality: The Spirit of Evolution. Boston: Shambhala.