Recently I saw a post addressing research on a 5-stage agile maturity model with stages something like this:
pre-crawl
crawl
walk
run
fly
This 5-stage model parallels organizational evolution to human development. The parallel may not hold up under scrutiny.
My colleague Lou Harris put it this way: "Five stage models exist for the same reason Centurions in the Roman Legions were given orders in groups of five: so they could check them off on their fingers."
Beware of 5-stage models. First of all, they descended from manufacturing models, which have some touchpoints with product development but also some significant differences in viewing the problem space. The 5 stages are possibly a cognitive carry-over from things other than business reality. (Phil Crosby’s book “Quality is Free” was my first exposure to a 5-stage model. His work was based on predecessor models.)
Staged maturity models focus us on layers of clustered improvement. They are nice, neat, useful for conceptual understanding, but of limited use when applied literally. We assume Organizations evolve along those layers. Usually, the layers help us see bands of typical behavior, but organizations tend to evolve along staggered paths. An activity associated with one layer may be executed earlier or later, depending on needs or constraints. The root of our desire to layer organizational evolution into bands is possibly because of how we observe human development in bands of capability, with typical development progressions.
But we aren't growing a baby, we are evolving an organization, often made up of thousands of individuals. Some trends may evolve along maturity bands, but more often than not there will be wide variability from group to group. from location to location. A common disaster is when organizations try to force evolution along maturity bands, and wind up killing off all innovation in those groups who are ahead of the pack.
A variation is breaking up those successful groups and planting their people among lower performing teams, in order to seed higher performance. Typically this results in demotivation. People miss their high-performing groups and are not organizational change zealots or experts. They mentally "check out."
The big risk is assuming a five-stage model is correct, and then falling into selection bias: keeping all data that seems to support that premise. The follow-on risk is trying to conform the organization to that model, rather than using the model as a starting place to learn about the organization and refine the model. A tertiary risk is assuming statistical validity for the model, and then imposing it on other parts of the enterprise or on other organizations.
[Like the fabled Space Shuttle booster size being restricted by the width of Roman chariots ((https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/railroad-gauge-chariots/) , the “count on your fingers” aspect of five-stage models my not be the same reason as having centurions count off orders on their fingers. But, then again, it may.]