Marc Burgauer - Maturity Mapping or how to tailor capability adoption to your existing culture (EN)

[00:00:16] Okay, I hope this works. So, going to talk about maturity mapping. Um, so, why do we care about maturity mapping in case you don't have time to see the whole talk, and you want to see whether you want to catch the video later. Um, so maturity mapping started out as uh, brainchild of Chris McDermot. This slightly nervous, I'm slightly nervous because he sits in the audience watching this talk. Um, but you're going to watch him speak, hopefully, if everything works well on the little video just in a little time. So we were focusing on practice. Uh, we were starting, we want to understand how organization works, but from the perspective of what people do rather than who they are. So traditional organizational development, design, it's all about individuals and how do we develop them and do they have skills, et cetera. Um, we're coming more from an agile, lean, then also into complexity, theory constraints, all of these kind of things. So we were more interested in what people do, uh, how we interact, et cetera. Um, so that was, uh, the starting point. Um, then Simon pointed, Jaap, who talked on Monday, uh, pointed social practice theory out to us. And we started, uh, engaging with that, and we thought that's a really interesting take and it has basically unlocked the whole approach that we were taking to understanding what we're doing. So maturity mapping is a way to map practices, how they, how they connect. We'll talk a little about that. And there is a little piffy definition, um, if you want one. Hopefully becomes more clear by the end. So, as I said, maturity mapping started out as something that Chris McDermot came up with. Um, he sent me this map that you can see here. So if you, if you recognize it, this is a Wordley map.
[00:02:18] Um, Wordley, Simon Wordley speaks on Friday the 27th and he will explain Wordley mapping, so I'm not going to explain Wordley mapping itself. I will just assume, um, you catch up with him or you read or you already know what a Wordley map is. But essentially a Wordley map, um, has an evolution axis that's here at the bottom. So the first evolution was about how do you get better at things that you do? Um, Simon has already given us categories, the four categories that you see at the bottom. Um, you see, sorry, I need to look closer. Novel, emerging, good, best. This is what we started out with. Um, you will notice throughout the talk, you will see various little bits on the axis and I'll talk a little about it. Um, don't get confused, it's not that important. The important thing is the bottom, the x-axis is evolution, so you get better in a practice as you go from left to right. Visib- visibility, um, in a Wordley map at the top is the user need. We might talk about maybe when we talk about practices, more about capabilities or organizational capability needs. So what does the organization need us to do? Uh, what work needs to get done? Um, and Chris on his first articulation started already branching three classical agile themes, um, categories, how we actually look at what we're doing. So one way we were looking at it is we, we need to build the right thing. So unless you build the right thing, whatever you build, your customer won't be able to use it, or it will not satisfy their need. But then you need to build it right, so you need to build it in a way that you can maintain it, that it makes money. Um, and then you actually also need to learn how to build this fast enough, as in how can you improve your product, your capability, et cetera. Um, so that was a starting point, you can see we started with this in about, started thinking about this 2018. Um, and so, that we had about this and Chris's thinking. He then posted a blog post, you can find it on Medium. Um, there's quite a few other blog posts and hopefully over the next little while we're going to, um, start getting our, uh, site, um, up and running properly. But you can see, um, there's a hashtag on Twitter where you can find us, it's on all the slides. So, why, why, why do we what motivated us going out down this road? And why are we busy with this? So, a lot of what we learn about organizational models, management thinking, et cetera, um, mostly everything that we actually talk about in the Western world is, is informed by what I call the traditional view, and that is to see the world as a machine. And so our metaphors, the way we're modeling, the way we're describing, work charts, blah, blah, blah, all of these reflect this, this machine metaphor, yeah? But living beings are not a machine. So, hopefully.
[00:05:25] First, what's a system? The system is a whole, spelled with a W, that consists of parts, each of which can affect its behavior or its properties. You, for example, are a biological system called an organism, and you consist of parts, your heart, your lungs, your stomach, pancreas, and so on, each of which can affect your behavior or your properties. The second requirement is that each part of the system, when it affects the system, is dependent for its effect on some other part. In other words, the parts are interdependent. No part of a system or collection of parts of a system has an independent effect on it. Therefore, the way the heart affects you depends on what the lungs are doing and the brain is doing. The parts are all interconnected. And therefore, a system is a whole that cannot be divided into independent parts. Now that has some very, very important implications that are generally overlooked. First, the essential or defining properties of any system are properties of the whole which none of its parts have. For example, a very elementary system you are familiar with is an automobile. The essential property of an automobile is it can carry you from one place to another. No part of an automobile can do that. The wheel can't, the axle can't, the seat can't, the motor can't, the motor can't even carry itself from one place to another. But the automobile can. You have certain characteristics, the most important of which is life. None of your parts live. You have life. You can write, your hand can't write. That's easy to demonstrate, cut it off and put it on a table and watch what it does. Nothing. You can see, your eye can't see, you can think, your brain can't think. And therefore, when a system is taken apart, it loses its essential properties. If I bring an automobile into this room and disassemble it, although every single part is in this room, I don't have an automobile. Because the system is not the sum of the behavior of its parts, it's the product of their interactions.
[00:07:44] So, that's Russell A. Ackoff. Um, you might know him, if not, I would urge you to start researching him, lots of things to say relevant to how we deal with organizations, how we improve organizations.
[00:08:03] So, core of his message is the interactions are creating properties out of the parts that the parts themselves don't have, so we call this they emerge, um, there's a new whole that emerges that has these properties. And this is what creates meaning, so Alicia Herrero is a complexity philosopher, my opinion, the complexity philosopher to read these days, um, and she says meaning exists in the interactions between things.
[00:08:31] Not in the things themselves. So having a list of your practices, et cetera, is not terribly uh, useful because the meaning of your practices come from the interactions that you're various practice have in your environment. Um, I'm talking about sociotechnical system, so in, in your environment with your people as well as with your technology.
[00:08:59] Another thing that we need to keep in mind when we think about these things is that we always operate at two levels, at least, um, two levels if we're, if we're, um, acting in an, in an, in an organization, if we're working in an organization. The organization itself limits to some extent what we can do as individuals, but the organization is also limited by what we can do as individuals independent of the organization. And we need to start interact at the both levels. So, sometimes constrain things from an organization level so that it enables us to do something as individuals, vice versa, sometimes as individuals maybe constrain what we make available to the organization so that the organization, um, can, can gain greater capability.
[00:09:47] So this is interactions matter at two levels. Something to keep in mind. So I want to illustrate a little bit what I mean with this. And, um, the simplest way to show you is talking about slime molds. So I don't know if you've ever heard of slime mold. You're going to hear now a little bit about it. Um, it's a single cell organism. So, single cell, it's an amoeba, I don't know how much biology you know, but it's a relatively primitive organism, an amoeba, even as a single cell. Um, you can see in the picture at the lower right, it can grow little tentacles. Um, essentially it eats bacteria.
[00:10:29] Um, if you, if you observe a single cell organism, what you see is rummaging around, moving, uh, in a liquid or or on a surface and looking for bacteria and eating bacteria, it's not not very exciting. Um, that's what it does, uh, might split itself. So, that's how it reproduces, by cell splitting, as amoebas do. Um, not terribly exciting.
[00:10:54] But when they come together as a group, it becomes more exciting. They start to self-organize, they start to exhibit, um, things that we would maybe attribute to a plant, something we can recognize as an organism. So what you see here is first it grew out on the right hand side, and then it meets several of its arms. So this, these are multiple, this is not just one slime mold, these are hundreds, probably even thousands of slime molds. What you see saw in the middle is a little bit of um, oats, it's a that's food. So it has food, and it uses this energy to find new food sources, and so it builds little tubules in which it transports food to the single cells that are at the periphery and looking for new food sources. So it starts track, um, as a collective. And as a collective, as slime molds, uh, can do amazing things. For example, it can solve the, um, traveling salesman problem or what's the shortest distance. So, on the big picture, you see the starting positions, you see we've put a little bit of oats, the researchers that did this, put a little oats, um, at some places in, in the maze. And the slime mold started to grow, and relatively quickly, actually found a connection. So the slime molds connected between the two food sources, but you see it starts to branch out. And then at some point it actually occupies the whole maze. But then it starts shrinking again and it just keeps this one line that you see lower right, which is the shortest distance between the two food sources through the maze. So slime mold collectively can solve mazes.
[00:12:40] Um, they can do lots of other interesting things, so for example, in a research experiment, they used a ventilator. That would blow cold air, which the slime mold doesn't like, yeah, every so often, so that's indicated by the clock, um, every so often, but in regular intervals. And what they could observe is that whenever, so after a while, the slime mold anticipated when the cold wind would come and just shut down the operations and wait till it's over. And that it learned this about environment and predicted it, could be observed by switching off the ventilator, and for a while, the slime mold keeps at the expected interval, still shutting down the metabolism a bit and preserve energy, even though there wasn't any cold wind. So it, it learns about things, it can has a sense of time, can measure time, can be precise on time, all by interaction. This is all this is all happening through the interaction. The most amazing thing about them is though how they do distance traveling. So a slime mold is a microscopic organism, it takes him forever, it would take forever to go from let's say one tree to another. So the way it travels is it creates spores. And this is a collective where some cells decide, I become a stem and I will die here. Yeah, I will exert the last bit of energy, blah, blah, blah, that we have, and I will die here. But I'll elevate some other, other cells of the collective to become spores, yeah, so they, they create spores and that's what's at the top here of this, it looks like a little fruit or a seed. And the wind takes it, um, maybe to the next tree. So, um, really complex behavior from a single cell organism just through collaboration. This is all achieved, there's, we have not found anything within the genetic information, um, other than the ability to communicate with other slime molds that helps us explain these phenomena. So we still actually don't understand how it works exactly, but clearly complex behavior. So how interactions really matter more. So, for us it's really important, oops, um, that we're shifting the focus from the individuals to practices. So that's this also, let's stop using psychology and let's use social phenomena and hence the interest in practice theory. Now, practice theory, um, has its roots, here come the French philosophers, if you read my tweets. Um, in Pierre Bourdieu, and there is a talk of Romeo. Romeo, sorry, on Tuesday the 24th that you should watch. I watched an English version because my French is not good enough. He's doing it in French, um, if you're not speaking French, go online, he, he did a talk about how you apply Bourdieu to tech, and really worth watching.
[00:15:37] Um, but Bourdieu basically started to try to, wants to understand society from the perspective of the social interaction. So he talks about, there is, so everybody would know what we do with normal capital, financial capital so to speak. But he says, much more important are actually symbolic and social capital. Um, also because they exist in societies that do not have currencies, so some of the societies that we can observe, let's say in the Amazon or so, they haven't been infiltrated by Western thinking and so, they might not have money, you will still find symbolic and social capital. What he means by social capital is essentially relationships. Having relation, in English we have, um, ha. We have an expression that I can't remember now. So, but essentially it's people you know, um, you can get access to a better job if you know somebody with influence, etc. So this is social capital, you have family members that will come to your aid if you're in need, this is social capital. Social capital is, is essentially the value that we're getting from having relationships with other people. Symbolic capital is already more cultural and more cultural is cultural specific. Um, symbolic capital for example could be, uh, I have a big diamond ring on my finger, yeah. Um, it shows that I'm rich, it shows maybe that I have, um, achieved things and so you give me respect. It's not so important that the diamond is expensive as what it symbolizes. So symbolic capital comes up everywhere, artifacts, almost if you look around yourself, um, culturally, everything that you don't eat, uh, that you don't need essentially for survival, but you still keep dear, there will be some symbolic capital. Involved. Um, he talks about habitus, habitus is then we understand society and how, how organizations and things like that work. As a field of habits, yeah, this is a strong simplification, but. It's, it's the easiest way to start understanding Bourdieu. And he's saying, okay, so habits or as we now call them practices, um, are the things that we're doing in, in our environment. That's how we exist in our environment, that's how we interact in our environment, this is what makes us, yeah. So you remember the Maslow earlier, um, society influences us, limits us or enables us, but equally, um, we enable society or we limit society, this interaction can, can be seen as habitus or fields.
[00:18:11] So Bruno Latour, another French philosopher. Came later along and he really wanted to inspect- this inspection of being, um, or get away from the inspection of being to inspect the doing. So he starts to articulate what is now seen as practice theory. Uh, said practices are performed, these are things that we do, talk about this. Um, but also they are shared, the way you learn a practice is somebody shows you, yeah. You, we can talk maybe later in the Q&A about the validity of learning practices from books, sometimes you can, maybe for example, I'm learning now some baking techniques from YouTube videos, um, in lockdown when you have time to acquire new skills or so. Um, but what you are in the way you're acting in an organization is you are a practitioner. Um, this also links for example to uh, Peter Drucker who talks about the practice of management or talks about knowledge workers as practitioners. So, if we want to look at practitioners, um, how would we start to describe practice in a tangible way? Um, so Chris McDermot in an experiment that he was coaching, he went in and said, so, show me all the things, put, put on a wall all the things that you do, yeah. Just use this doing, um, lens. But they would put things up like Jira or maybe even talk about frameworks like accelerate, um, or things like that, so it was very confused.
[00:19:54] But one of the things that we've started to realize is practices are everywhere, yeah. Almost everything you do can be expressed as a practice. From the morning you get up, you wash yourself, you have breakfast, then you do some work, you no longer commute, but that would be a path, all of these things can be expressed as practices. So, we needed, we were looking for a language, we were looking for something, how can we actually articulate practice in a tangible way? Also in a way that we can talk to each other about practices in a meaningful way, how, for example, we could improve using practices. maybe even talk about frameworks like accelerate or things like that. So it was very confused.
[00:19:53] But one of the things that we started to realize is practices are everywhere, yeah? Almost everything you do can be expressed as a practice from the morning you get up, you wash yourself, you have breakfast, and you do some work, you no longer commute, but that will be a practice. All of these things can be expressed as practices.
[00:20:14] So, we needed, we were looking for a language, we were looking for something, how can we actually articulate practice in a tangible way, also in a way that we can talk to each other about practices in a meaningful way how for example we could improve using practices. So here's something that we need to quickly insert before we get to that, and this is maturity models. Um, this is just a small reference from this conference, uh, French culture. Um, the picture here is a sheep that's lying, I don't know whether you can see it, but it sticks its tongue out and makes a gesture. That's my feeling, has always been my feeling about maturity models. Um, there's this expression best practice. And as a practitioner, this has always bugged me because a practice might be good in one environment, but it's not always best in every environment and in every circumstance yet. Maturity models have this this this need to to express things in universally valid circum circumstances and framings. So here are some maturity models you might recognize some of them. And I want to make clear that we don't think they're absolute crap. Okay, so there are maturity models like the Deloi, uh Agile Lean Agile landscape you uh tube map. I I think that's pretty uh bad, especially like really mature practices like Canefin or right shifting or things like that, even management 300, you can't get to it. Yeah, there's if you sub the map, there's no connection points, they're just lines on themselves. So as a practitioner, you can't use that map to even figure out how do I get to these practices. Um, but usually, um, practices do, um, encapsulate some value of things that were learned by the people who did it, so they're practitioners. Um, but the core problem is they're static, so they don't change, they don't adapt to anything that happens to you, they're linear, they're context-free. So they don't care where you're trying to do this, they don't help you. So, okay, you're telling me in theory this is the process I should go through. Oh, here's some obstacles in my environment. How do I overcome them? Don't look at mature models, they will not tell you that.
[00:22:33] So they sort of see competence as something that's context-free. And that fundamentally disagrees with what uh Bourdieu and Latur talk about practices. They say the practices happening in specific environments are are an expression of characteristics of the environment and the people and the technology that we're using in this environment. So you can't take competences out of context.
[00:22:59] Um, this is how Dave Snowden says it. You only know how you know it when you need to know it. So even if you try to explain to somebody exactly how they need to do something, you will miss things. You you will not be aware. The easiest way to teach somebody a practice is pairing. Literally, yeah, come, I'll do it, you watch. Once you think you know a little bit how it works, we'll switch, I observe you, I might show you, um, I correct you, etcetera, but you have to be in the context, with the people, with the technology, doing it, to properly explain a practice. And then also, unless we're actually doing the practice, we will not discover what we actually should be practicing. So, in a sense, you can start with a practice, but as soon as you start practicing, you will start experiencing friction. Friction starts to inform how you have to change the practice. So when we when Woody Zu talks about work, that's essentially what it comes down to, it says, unless you do, you're not going to have any experiences from your context that inform how you improve and what you really how you really get to achieve the outcomes that you're seeking.
[00:24:09] So doing, it's all about doing. There's a few other things that most maturity models suffer from, um, there's a little tweet of me, but essentially,
[00:24:20] it's it's a problem about the word maturity models, because they essentially say, it doesn't matter whether you're a multinational organization or you're a little startup, if you don't do things this way, you're immature. And what we often experience when we're applying maturity models is that, um,
[00:24:39] no, we're not doing exactly what it says because in our circumstances this will work and we have to change it, yeah, but now the model says we're immature. If somebody comes from the outside and assesses us, that will say, oh, immature, immature team.
[00:24:54] Um, it conflates, um, effectiveness with a learning path. So, once you actually get good at delving into maturity models and and getting the gist out of them, um, what you realize is you're not going to you're not going to go and get expertise or it's not very effective to get expertise in the linear path that they give you to learn, yeah?
[00:25:17] Because you will need to learn, so on the path, you need to learn what they think builds up, um, your maturity, but a lot of that might actually be completely irrelevant for the problem that you're trying to solve. So you will start picking and choosing things from the maturity model according to the problem that you actually solve. And you might not ever touch the other things if if you got the benefit that you wanted from studying the maturity model. So Trenton explains this as, um, it it it gives you a territory and marks the X and the little path, but it doesn't tell you anything about the topography, the obstacles that you might experience, etcetera. And then the worst thing about maturity models is that usually they come with a class uh with a cast of high priests. So there's certification programs, if you look like scrum.org or safe or so, there's a whole pyramid scheme of certification and courses and blah blah blah. So you get in this whole thing and then at some point you need other people to regurgitate this the the sermons the same way everybody else does because otherwise you're not profiting from having invested into this pyramid. So you get stuck and at some point you will realize, hey, I'm teaching things I no longer believe.
[00:26:30] So, another way of looking at maturity models then is to say, they are experience, they're encapsulating experience, but it's decontextualized, context is removed, yeah, no more context.
[00:26:43] And then you as a practitioner, you have to recontextualize it.
[00:26:49] Maybe, so if you look at some maturity models, they give you a little bit of a hint how you could do this, but it comes in the form of customization. So what I mean with customization is, for example, if you if you want to buy clothes now, you can go to online shops and they'll let you customize the thing. As in, let's say, for example, you buy a suit, they might let you change the length of the trousers, uh, the leg length, or the arm length, or maybe a little bit about the uh, the chest, etcetera. But, um, what they're doing is they're just combining pre, um, already pre-cut bits. It is not a tailor suit. Um, we would argue that Dora is for example a customization of goods devops practices, yeah? But the problem is, um, you're okay with a customized suit if you only need to wear it, let's say,
[00:27:43] you only wear once a week or something. But if you have to wear it every day for everything you do, including, um, all the mundane tasks, not just the shiny bit, you want a you want a suit if that's what you want to wear that is tailored, yeah?
[00:28:01] That is comfortable and totally adapted to your body. And so you go to a tailor because a tailor not only takes your measurements, but also talks to you about your preferences, a little bit about, do you sit a lot? Do you walk a lot? Are you jumping around? And you have dogs, and maybe you need a fabric that doesn't uh catch all the hair, etcetera. There's all these little things and what you get away with is a is as good a suit as a comfortable and good-looking as you can get, yeah? And you will be happily wearing it every day. Now, when we build capability, technology and an organization, we wear this suit every day, yeah? And so we believe we should do tailoring, not customization. So if you look at the Dora has a questionnaire, you go through it, that's a decision tree, that's customization. What I'm going to hopefully show you if I get through my talk a little bit more quickly is, um, how do you tailor? How do you make this actually work for yourself? How do you, for example, recontextualize a maturity model?
[00:29:04] So, we called it maturity mapping deliberately to play in the semantic space. Um, what we experience, maturity model in organization used to judge people often by people who actually don't have the expertise. They just know, ah, here's the questionnaire, tick tick tick, yes, you're good, tick tick, no, you're not good. Um, we want to give you a get out of jail free card. We call maturity model we call the maturity model or mapping to give you an antidote. So if they come with a maturity model, you can say, yeah, but that's a pure categorization system, look at the rich data that we have from the map.
[00:29:42] Um, if you saw Dave's talk on Monday, so this plays in the social technical space that he was talking about, social interactions mediated by technologies, what we mean with sociotechnical space. And he showed you this slide. So maturity mapping plays in the space of cognitive engineering. Now, I have a problem with using the engineering term here. Just because engineering has the mechanistic uh tendency. I'm not saying all engineers and all engineering has to be uh mechanistic, but it tends to be so. Um, I would use more a biological word, um, if you look me up, you will find out I'm a bio or I started out as a biologist. Um, but I haven't found yet a term that I like better, and also Jape pointed out he didn't choose that term. This is a standard term in our literature, so maybe we'll just have to live with it and get engineers to start thinking a little bit more about biology.
[00:30:43] So another thing from Jabe, um, he didn't talk about this talk about it, but he makes a big point in some of his other talks is that we that we stop thinking about transformation, yeah, transformation is an end point that is finished etc. We should talk about transitioning. So as we acquire new capabilities, we try to transition and we need to express, um, the things that we do as transitions. So this is also that we start to understand that we're more interested in understanding our current,
[00:31:09] rather than fantasizing about some future state of the organization, that we're focusing on where we are and what are steps that we can do right now. Uh, Dave Snowden calls this next adjacent. So we're looking for next adjacents, yeah? So we're transitioning from where we are into the next adjacent, and then instead of actually just keep going in a direction of a transformation is, we'll look around again and say, okay, our assumptions still holding, are we on the right track, did what we expect happen, etcetera. So think in transitions.
[00:31:42] Now we can get to social practice theory. So, social practice theory was articulated by Elizabeth Shove, she's a professor at Lancaster University, and she's a social scientist. But also has a strong influence studied elements of design, etcetera. Um, so and came up with this art specific articulation of practice theory, um, that we obviously found very useful. And the core of her thinking is that you can express every practice as a combination of three.
[00:32:19] It's meaning, material and competences. Um, I'll give you an example in a little second. Um, but they're not independent elements, they interact all the time. I'll show you a little bit how these interactions also what kind of pattern we see in the interaction. But it's important to see that you can improve them all, so you can you can get your meaning might change, you can get more competent or you can even improve the material, but you can only do one of them so much before it starts influencing the other and then you need to shift a little bit the focus, yeah? And so I look this as a like a dance between three dancers, um, with all their own characteristics, but together something so if if you get the integration to work then it's like a choreograph dance.
[00:33:10] So evolution in practice theory, social practice theory, only has three stages, it's not terribly will see in a second, it doesn't help very much with worth mapping. Um, there's proto practices where you see there's no integration. So the things are around and we might even have some thoughts or some ideas how they relate, but we haven't integrated them yet. But then we start we might experiment, at some point we start to see the integration, we can integrate them, that's when it becomes a practice. And then at some point it might be superseded by a practice comes along that satisfies this purpose, this need better and we no longer do it and we start to forget about the integration and in the future we might still see some artifacts around of a past practice.
[00:33:55] So practices evolve over time, um, and they might influence each other. Yeah, so as I said, uh, there might be influences.
[00:34:05] But when we looked a little bit about started to analyze how things really work, what we saw is is more like this. So meaning most of us changes slowly, maybe doesn't change at all. Or there might be a higher meaning that doesn't change, but then some um refinements of the meaning for the context might change a little. And what we're seeing is that competence gets materialized.
[00:34:31] Um, so simply said, tools are materializing practice. If you think about any kind of tool, then there is there was originally some skill involved in doing it with a lesser tool, yeah, and then the practitioner found a way, oh, I can put the skill that I now developed into the tool, so make it easier for others to acquire. And this is very important. So as the materialization of the world is progressing is what we're doing is we're reducing the need for practices. But what you find, uh, for example, in uh, SRE or etcetera, in in uh, more edgy kind of, um, applications, is that you still need to know what the competences are, and you still need to have some expertise in it, even if your tooling is fantastic. Because when things break, that's basically where the tooling might get in the way and one of my heuristics that I take away from this is, well, if your practice doesn't work anymore, maybe remove a tool, do some of the things again manually that you use the tool for because when you have to do it manually, you have a bigger surface of experiencing the problem.
[00:35:37] And you might realize where your tool might get in the way.
[00:35:43] So, I want to make this a bit more, um, practical. I'm just going to quickly explain a little bit of practice theory through, um, ironing. Um, this came
[00:35:55] So I started thinking about this uh from a little challenge that Chris he has a few you can find some videos on YouTube about Agile Ironing, this is sort of the social practice theory gang's response to it.
[00:36:08] Um, so here you see a what they call a complex, but let's talk about this as a capability. So in social practice theory terms this is complex, but we find capability is a better way of expressing it in our world.
[00:36:21] Um, so in order to have a clean shirt, I need to have a few practices that I'm feel relatively comfortable to perform, yeah? So you can see I have to be I have to know how to clean a shirt, I need to know how to dry the shirt, I have to set up the iron and then actually do the ironing, yeah. Um, so then I started researching a little bit ironing.
[00:36:43] So here is a little timeline of how ironing as a practice has developed, as a capability. Um, I'm going to analyze a little quickly just to illustrate these three elements and how they interact. So the the meaning is smoothing smoothing fabric, have smooth fabric. So we think at the prehistoric or long time ago, Viking stage, maybe even the Chinese, the purpose of that was actually preservation of the fabric. So treating it in this way meant that it was less likely to crack or rip, etcetera, when we used it. So that's preservation was the original meaning, why would we do this? Uh, derived meaning is we want smooth smooth fabric. So you can look at the Vikings and what you see is that they have uh hack boards and they have polished stones or maybe pieces of wood, and they would just do this endlessly, very laboriously, needed lots of strength and pressure, it wasn't much fun. Chinese came along and said, oh, we can use a pan with hot coals in it, so there's a hot pan and if we run it skillfully across the fabric, um, it it takes out all the creases, it flattens all the creases. Um, interesting to know that the specific pans they used were already in use like 300 years earlier before they even um started ironing. So 300 years the material was already there, but it wasn't integrated yet in in a practice to do ironing.
[00:38:15] Um, but then we get to uh something we recognize as an iron in the 17th century in Europe. The reason I took this picture is it was very common that people actually would have several irons because so what you see there is basically just cast iron slabs, yeah?
[00:38:30] So where the Chinese because of the way it worked, had to do this as pairs, now you could do it alone. So, already see, so here's the first thing that materialized, so material helped us to change the practice from a pair, pairing practice to a solo practice. Um, we also then suddenly came up with the idea, oh, we can use a table and we'll put a table cloth on it.
[00:38:53] So, um, you no longer needed to stretch the fabric, so no need for two people, yeah.
[00:39:00] So the cast iron made that happen. Um, you had to rotate these irons with a stove, so that means you needed a lot of skill like you need to understand how hot the iron, um, sort of have a sense, oh, is it hot enough? I mean, you wouldn't put it on your face, but what I read is people would use their hands or their cheek or so just to sense, that's the right temperature because if it's too hot, it burns the fabric, if it's too cold, it doesn't iron. Yeah, so you needed the skills, rotate the irons, as a maid, you know, you were still expected to get through lots of um laundry in a short period of time. So all these skills had to be developed. Some people got really sophisticated, um, even the irons themselves got sophisticated, so you see the guy with this fancy color, you need these special irons, um, to to iron these colors so that they were nice and stiff. Um, you might look at this and say that that looks familiar, so this is also how practices and materials spawn new practices. They used the same tool then actually to model hair, yeah, so especially for wigs initially, but um as they got better with it, actually, um, they used it for hair. And it's the prototype of a curling iron. So practice material influence spawn new practices materials.
[00:40:17] Um, then we get to the gas iron, so once gas became ubiquitous, suddenly, uh, we get a gas iron. That means it's just plugged into your gas supply, means you don't have to rotate irons anymore, so it made all these competencies were no longer needed, they were all materialized in the gas iron. And then we get to the electric iron, which has a thermostat and you no longer need to know heat, you don't need to be good at sensing the heat, you can just say, oh, I'm doing cotton, that's the setting for cotton, light goes on or off depending on your model. and says, we're at the right temperature, now you can iron. Materializing competencies. So practice and material influence spawn new practice and materials. Um, then we get to the gas iron. So once gas became ubiquitous, suddenly, uh, we had a gas iron. That means it's just plugged into your gas supply, means you don't have to rotate irons anymore, so make all these competences were no longer needed. They were all materialized in the gas iron. And then we get to the electric iron, which has a thermostat and you no longer need to know heat. You don't need to be good at sensing the heat. You can just say, oh, I'm doing cotton, that's the setting for cotton. Light goes on or off depending on your model and says, we're at the right temperature, now you can iron. materializing competences. So I let Chris now talk a little bit quickly about why we like social practice theory.
[00:41:02] So why should you care about social practice theory? If you have an interest in how things are done in teams and organizations and are someone who's keen to change how things are done, then I think you'll find social practice theory really interesting.
[00:41:17] It excites me because of its simplicity and elegance, and how it invites me to view the things we do through three lenses. Um, why we want to do it, what we need to know to be able to do it, and what we need to use in order to do it. It allows me to think not just about purpose or tools or skills, but it asks me to think about all three and how they integrate together in small packages in the day-to-day things that we do. It allows me to see how the small doings, um, and how they integrate together to make larger, complex doings. Um, it allows me to see how these meanings and skills and tools connect across other things we do, other doings, and how they are essential for these things, these doings, to comfortably coexist in the same context. It also asks me to think about the social, how we do things together, and the individual, how you or I do things the same or differently. And finally, it lets me think about how all of this information helps me make sense of our context and gives me insights into how things could change or are being changed and the challenges that arise.
[00:42:44] Okay, so let's delve into real maturity mapping. As I said, I think it's a visualization of capabilities as an integration of practices, um, and that basically informs conversations about how we improve. So, again, this is a wardley map. If you don't know wardley maps, watch Simon's talk later, um, in the program. You have two axes, visibility, knob visibility, at the top of visibility is what we say there's the need that we're trying or the capability in our case that we're trying to, um, achieve. Bottom axis is, how good are you? So when we have, so a big plot of wardley maps over other model ways is that it talks about movement, yeah? So here are some movements. Um, see in the center, you see a practice, you can expose it. Let's say, for example, your need comes from stakeholders, you maybe want to share the practice because you want better support or you might just want to show it off, yeah? Um, you bring it further up, or you want to hide it. This is your stakeholders really don't care about this, might not even be good if they know about this, might make them nervous, so you want to you want to put it further down on on the map. Um, going to the right in general means you want to develop, improve, amplify skill, et cetera. But sometimes you will re-weigh, oh, actually something's not right here about the practice. We need to take it apart again, uh, the material is getting in the way, so you want to reconfigure it, yeah, for example, because you're hitting a problem and you can't figure out why is this not working, yeah, so you start doing things more manually again. That's a reconfigure. You might also want to improve, uh, introduce a competing practice, yeah, so for let's say, uh, you have a software team, they do traditional stage testing, yeah, they might be in the team, but they're doing the testing after the developers. And you want to introduce like things like TDD and PDD to improve the quality, so that might be as an agile coach, how come I'm showing you new things that's improve introducing a new practice to compete with your old testing practice. Um, I will also show a little bit how you can use Wardley map and practices for skill liquidity. We'll get to that in a sec. So back to uh, Aco's little example of driving, here is a complex that allows you to drive. In order to drive, you need to be good at certain practices that I'm just just indicated a few here, but let's look at this on a practice map. This is a practice map for driving.
[00:45:14] I'm not going to explain all the bits. Um, this is a version that we're currently using sometimes when we work especially with, uh, outside people. So we all work, um, mostly with the same client, but we'll also work with other clients, um, that helps frame the conversation when we're starting a map. Um, so you have a purpose. Why are you doing the map? What are you trying to learn? Who are the people that actually care about this map and what kind of, who's the person who has the needs that what you're trying to capture here is materializing? And then actually explain what the need is. So here is an adult person has the transportation, he needs to get from A to B. Here are all the little things that you need to do. So what I modeled here, what you see as a new practice on the bottom left, depending on where you have the screen, is, um, using a stick. So my wife, um, learned driving in Canada, and when we came to Scotland, she had to, uh, actually learn how to drive a stick. To get, uh, so we could rent cars, for example. You wouldn't get any automatic cars here. Everybody drives stick, so she had to learn this. So suddenly her ability, uh, using a stick shift, uh, a gear car, actually to shift gears, um, was, uh, extremely hampered, so she couldn't travel from A to B without learning that. And so, um, just a quick example, but what you should take away from here is what we're describing here. Things that you do, yeah? These are all things that you do.
[00:46:40] And when you map practices, that's what your focus should be on. So because this is a wardley map, we need to talk about the X-axis because if you go traditional wardley mapping, which I would say service product and maybe architecture oriented. So I might be rambling for that because it does articulate how you could use mapping for everything. So we didn't invent the idea of using practices on a Wardley map. Simon has already provided that. We just changed a little bit how how we're using maps and what lens we're using on the maps from what Simon does. Um, but that's that's basically the big thing on a traditional Wardley map. The big insights are all around the X-axis, so we need to discuss this a little.
[00:47:19] So the core attribute of the X-axis on a Wardley map is that from you get more value from the thing as it moves from left to right, yeah? You can extract more value, it creates, it creates more value. So when we translate this to a practice, it means the organization or the team or maybe just the individual gets more value from nurturing the practice. So on a Wardley mapping, proto practice might be at the far, just at the beginning, if at all. And then it goes all the way to the right, that's just practice, and X practice would be off the map to the left. But you could also, for example, use the four competences model, if you know it. If you don't, you probably can infer what the model actually says just from the four categories, and we would say unconscious incompetence is off the map. Because if you have no sense of value, then, um, you wouldn't even enter that, yeah? You wouldn't even think about how to improve it, et cetera. So you need to be conscious, competent. So Wardley himself has, has some labels that we used, concept, emerging, good, and best. But if you wanted, for example, for a personal improvement map, you could just use the Drive Force model, and you'll see we have done that. This is work in process. Um, we're still hoping one day we'll come up maybe with better labels for the X-axis, but for now we're quite happy using these and playing around with some of our ideas in other ways. Uh, for example, cheat sheet. So, you need to be able to position a practice on the X-axis. So, here's a cheat sheet. I will make the slides available. I'm not going to talk you through now because, um, that was our first cheat sheet, um, but Chris came recently up with a much better cheat sheet, um, that I wanted to quickly show. Which essentially comes from observability. Um, so, What can you observe?
[00:49:09] Um, at concept stage, you're basically aware. You know there is such a thing as a practice or you think there should be a practice for a particular problem, but you're not really getting any value out, you're experimenting, playing, it's you want to get used to it, yeah? You get into emerging when you actually start to use it to get benefit. Oh, now that we're we're doing it, this actually helps, it makes the work in some ways better. Um, and also the organization or other people who see you doing it, they can maybe see that you have improved, yeah, so the value, the early benefits are recognized. There is no consistency, yeah? That's the issue. So once you get to, oops, consistency, sorry.
[00:49:48] Um, that's when you get good. Yeah, so now you're doing some things repeatedly, you can do them again and again, they work reliably, they give you the value. You still see a lot of friction, that's why you're not, you're not best yet, because there's still a lot of friction. But also your organization now gets interested in this. Oh, so you show us what you're doing. Should other people maybe start helping doing you what you're doing here? So now it gets traction, yeah, it becomes a thing in the organization. And you get to best when your team says, hey, that's when the other teams come and say, can you please show us? We want to learn from you. Yeah, we have these problems. Can we please discuss these with you? You are doing it yourself way consistent. It has low friction, um, in a retro. You never, this never comes up as something you need to talk about. Everybody's happy. So the idea is you start with these questions, but then as you start using them, um, you should actually maybe also look, okay, for a specific practice in our environment, in our context, we have seven teams. We should start to be able to say, yeah, if you still have these problems, you're still emerging. If you have these kind of problems, you're still in good. Or if we see all of these things, then you're at best, yeah? You should start very specific questions and, so this is important that you contextualize your X-axis and how you position yourself in your context, not a maturity model. So this is still a big context free, but it forces you to observe. And that's why I like it and so hence you immediately have to contextualize it. Uh, another little tool that we came up with is practice cards. So, talk a little bit about ironing. Here's ironing as a as a practice diagram. Um, this is what a practice card for ironing might look like. So a simple version of this practice card, early version. So we just list the meaning, competence, material, yeah? Relatively clear. And then you can put these practice cards on a map, yeah? So this is my practice map for ironing. And you can see I'm really good at setting up the iron, and I'm really good at drying the shirt, but, um, cleaning still makes every now and then a mistake, ironing still make a little mistakes. So, yeah, room for improvement. And then there's actually my real problem that I found out, I'm really crappy at storing a shirt. So I iron very nicely, but then when I put it away, I don't, ah, thank God somebody invented hangers, because folding shirts, I'm totally crap at. Um, but I could also put in a completely different approach on the map as a competition to serving the need of having nine and shirt. I could use laundry service. Just to show you. Uh, but having used this in practice, um, we arrived at a very different kind of practice card. And so the idea of the practice card that I'm showing you now is also that you can allow your team to start collecting them in real time before maybe your first mapping session. So it's, okay, go and fill out. Practice cards for all the things that you do. And when we started in question, coaching and working with people, we realized, yeah, okay, so meaning material is clear. Yeah, they should know why they're doing a practice and they should know what material they're using for a practice.
[00:52:58] Oops, went back.
[00:53:05] Um, but competencies are actually often quite a bit more tricky, um, and so just asking them, so how do you do well, is sort of a combo of, yeah, we we will see some competence is mentioned, but also what good competence looks like. So it already helps us for the questionnaire, for the X-axis. Um, and once you do a practice, you start capturing, working with it in this way for a while, you also want to maybe capture some stories around the practice. So how you talk about a practice is very important also how we can propagate it.
[00:53:41] So some more examples, teams.
[00:53:44] So you can tell a transition story using maps and use artifacts instead of some maturity model, headline-y kind of things. So this is a team I worked with, okay, so I'm sorry, I'm a bit short of time, I'm going to run a bit over. If you have questions, you maybe should start put them in the Q&A if you have to leave or so, um, or I will keep now an eye on the chat. But I want to tell you a few stories with real maps that we use. So this is very early days, this is literally we just started to think about practice theory and I had this problem with a team, um, so they were essentially like a, uh,
[00:54:19] digital channel that was added, uh, to a business that had a shop front and that would have call centers, but they didn't have anything digital. And so we introduced some, they introduced some technology layers, et cetera. To use most of the infrastructure is there, but enable it to front end. Um, while I was there, working with this organization, a new head of department was introduced.
[00:54:46] And he had the main, the main job he was picking up was you need to reduce the cost of change. Yeah, so change is far too painful, costs too much, we need to get better at change. So he went to a conference, uh, IT conference, big name conference, and went to a booth and they say, oh, we have these business process apps, yeah, nobody needs to program anymore. Your business analysts, they can write the app, um, just runs on top of your tech layer, blah, blah, blah. Solves all your problems, change becomes really easy. And he came back, oh yeah, I'm just go about to go and sign a multi-million dollar check. Um, do you think we can do this, yeah?
[00:55:26] And he talked a little about, and so this is what we're factoring this diagram, not that they have maps.
[00:55:33] Um, yeah, easy peasy, not much to do. We just need to move these things over here, we're done, yeah? Easy peasy.
[00:55:41] Yeah, if only.
[00:55:44] They overlooked several other aspects and if we put them all together, suddenly the change doesn't look as good anymore. Sorry, went on too far. So this is when business analysts, product owners, blah, blah, blah in the company started to think about and said, oh, a lot of change. And so I was working with this XP team and uh, I just happened to tell them about this strangler pattern and say, go read that Martin Fowler article that explains the process. And of course they came, I'm not saying this was deliberate, but it was, and of course they came back immediately, um, or immediately within a week and said, how about we're doing this, yeah? So instead of buying this expensive thing and spend months and months doing training and techy transfer and blah, blah, blah to get it working, so by the way, if you have a bigger transition, you might recognize this pattern. Um, why don't we just write a wrapper? And then if we need to change things, um, we can do them at the wrapper label and slowly, slowly strangle the legacy architecture underneath. And that's what they did. Now, the reason I'm showing you these maps is that I worked out these maps with a team, techie team, and we showed that to the new department head and we could convince him that this is better. And so they didn't go down the expensive, um, architecture change and change all the things to have something that I now hear is actually not terribly, uh, great to use if unless your business case exactly fits into the business cases that the maturity model behind this, um, application layer, um, assumed.
[00:57:18] So here are the two in comparison, you just can see visually very quickly how one means a lot less change and a lot less disruption than the other. And also then when we went about and started doing the wrapper, um, in a breathtaking way. So we were, uh, so this product team was then, um, touted around the organization as this is how you need to do things. Just when lockdown happened, though, I heard because most of them were contracted, the whole team was axed. So, these things might not give you longevity.
[00:57:48] Um, quick example also, um, that I want to show you, and I show you just a crappy thing because, um, this is the corporate mirror, so I just took a picture, but this is a made up, so this is not a real person. Um, I'll get to the real example in a second. But this is just how the maturity map of, uh, an individual looks like. So what we're seeing here are the practices in the team and the person positions themselves against the team's capabilities. So what's best is you would be the best in the team in this practice, yeah, and what's novel or, um, concept is, yeah, you just know about this, but you really have, you have no expertise in it yet. And so you can articulate personal development maps and development initiatives and you can discuss how this would fit in a bigger picture of the team. So, all together now. So this is a real example of Chris doing something with a bigger area in an organization. Where you, so what you see at the top right, and then you see a bunch of practice things, you see some meanings not on a map. But you could put them on the map if you really know where to, um, how evolved your meaning is. That's sometimes a difficult conversation. Um, and below you see further maturity maps where they actually talk about the practices. What you see at the top is actually more an artifact map. Um, not going to get into that now because of time.
[00:59:15] Because I want to show you this. So this was actually how to enhance, this is a team that wanted to become better at enhancing the product, and we did the whole map canvas.
[00:59:26] Um, one of the things we realized, oh, yes, they didn't want to come better, they wanted to become better by splitting. Um, so this team came to me and said, so I coached them at some problems and then didn't see them for maybe six months, and they came back and said, we have a big problem. Um, we have grown and now we have split, and now we have two teams and they're not functional. And so one way to find out why they're not functional was I basically said, okay, so on the map, put dots where where you have expertise. And so you see the yellow dots and the blue dots from the team, it became relatively quickly clear that they split according to personal preferences, how well they liked each other. Which means people who had similar expertise wanted to stay together. So literally each team had about, was good about half the stuff that the original team had to be good at, yeah? So this is uh, skill liquidity capture of practices. So you can then say, okay, we should maybe split them in a way that you have more and even distribution, or you can say, okay, maybe we'll just start cross teams pairing, um, to start improving the skills of individuals so that we have the right distribution here.
[01:00:33] Getting through the end of it. Um, scale function, the doing over structure, the beings. This is, I can't explain to you a bit deeper now. I hope much of what I said makes this actually clear. But when we design things, yeah, don't design a future structure. Look at what you're doing and which of these things that you're doing you want more of, function, yeah, what it does, capability. And try to figure out how you get more of that, more people doing it, obviously, yeah? How would you embed this? Look at your map, how, how do you, how do these things fit into the wider organization. So if you want to, let's say, for example, you want to have continuous delivery, yeah, because you want to release more quickly. But your product function, for example, just can't keep up with telling you good things to build, right things to build, yeah, you're wasting your time improving your continuous delivery further. So a practice map will start to show you, oh, here's a connection between practices. This is how they hang together. I can't move just one to the right if the other one's still far on the left. Yeah, we'll not get any benefit. That, that's a sign of friction. Distance on a map is a sign for friction. So this allows you to start focusing on function and let structure emerge. This is how nature does it. Nature never designs structure, the structure is the outcome of the evolution, not not what it evolves to, you know, or evolves for.
[01:02:01] Um, so you can take a, a team, um, this is similar to, so this is the same team that we looked at, but this is the individual. So you can then take the practices of the team and say, okay, this individual needs to get better at certain things and articulate them in this way. By the way, if if you do moves on a practice map, you can use four-corner contextualization from Cynefin to inform how you do the move. So if you don't know Cynefin then use the heuristics. Um, only look at the. Only look at three categories. So, one category is things are clear. Everybody knows how to do it. Well, then no need for learning. The second category is complicated. That means experts know how to do it. So that means you want to learn something and you know who knows it, yeah? But a lot of what we have to do in organizations is actually new learning. We need to discover things. Yes, they might work elsewhere, but the way they worked elsewhere doesn't really translate here. So that's also discovering new. So this is complex. In complex, you have to do safe to fail parallel experiments.
[01:03:05] I usually articulate, try to find the smallest intervention that could possibly give you a benefit, yeah? Try to articulate your your transition as the smallest thing that could possibly work. Heard that before? Okay, last example. Um, this is a little bit more about meaning. So in an organization that we're working in, um, they introduced OKRs. And not totally by the book, very lightly, very loosely, okay, in my sense. Um, but it didn't get much of the benefit. And when we looked into it, then we started realized, oh, okay, when we trickle down the key results to the next layer, um, they had not interpreted this key result the same way we did, yeah? So if you know in OKRs, you trickle down your key results, trickle down, become their objectives. So it's very important that we actually mean the same things and understand the same things.
[01:03:57] Um, so we introduced back brief. Chris actually introduced back brief, just not taking credit. Um, and it overcame the problem. So sometimes looking at the map, having discussion, you can try and introduce new practice. Can you come up with things that help? So benefits of using of focusing on practice.
[01:04:21] It removes the which can be really hurtful, uh, between social and technical. It gives you a lens to look at everything because you're still looking at meaning, so how you motivated people still matters, we're just talking about it at a collective level and we no longer need to inspect, oh, do you actually have the right attitude, which is something that I really hate that we're doing in organizations. Nobody comes in the organization, starts taking up a job and says, oh yeah, I'm signing also up to, um, attitude correction. Um, practice as the focus of our attention means we're also focusing more on interactions rather than individuals. And maturity then becomes, I'm good at a practice. How well can I perform this? Do other people agree that I'm good at it? Yeah, now I'm the best in the company or at least among the best of the company. But maturity is not some abstract thing that's defined in a model and say you've done all these tick box things, it's a social thing. Um, it eliminates the illusion that you can plunk any technology into an environment and it just works. Yeah, so the example of the business app that the guy wanted to introduce, you can't just, you take people in front of a map and say, so where do you want?
[01:05:36] How does this connect to the other things? Do we have the right competences? Is this actually meaningful given our strategy? You can ask these questions without actually immediately having to challenge the person, so Simon says this, discussing a map, even if you tell stories while you explain the map, is less challenging than if somebody comes and tells you a story, here's my big theory. And you said, I'm not buying into it because you challenge him. But if you challenge a map, all your challenge is, is this the right position on the map?
[01:06:07] Oops, I lost focus in.
[01:06:11] I'm going to skip now the recipe. We have a recipe, I could talk you if we have time. Oh, no, I have the jail thing.
[01:06:22] No longer. Okay. I have two keyboards. So to close.
[01:06:29] Um, the difference between a maturity map and a Wardley map is we're focusing on practice. And we're more interested, you could use a Wardley map to articulate your technology strategy, product service strategy. You can then use a maturity map to figure out how you execute it. Do we have the right competences? Do we have the right skills? Do we have the right meanings? Are we set up for this, et cetera? Or vice versa, you could look at maturity maps to see what strategy options do we have? Where are our strengths? How can we leverage our strengths? What, which practices could we improve to get more strength of that? Yeah, so it goes again both ways, Maslow. Um, situational awareness of what you do and what you need to do. Um, situational awareness of what you do and what you need to do. Whereas Wardley is a little bit more, um, where are you in terms of what you have and what you want?
[01:07:20] And I think that's almost the last slide before we get to the to the read me. Nilufer Merchant says, nobody creates the future, yeah? It's not created by a single person, it's not just created, it's co-created. Future emerges from the interaction, from us trying to improve, to do things better. That's what the future is. So I hope I explained the too long didn't read, um, well enough. Um, ex, apologies that I over ran a little bit, even though I didn't have tech problems to, uh, blame. But I will stay around for question.

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