The May 19th Spin Sucks blog The Six Stages of PESO Model® Maturity found that 91% of teams sit at Scale or below, while 68% describe themselves as running PESO as a system. Every one of those self-described integrators scored in the bottom two stages. That gap isn’t dishonesty; it’s what happens when you assess what someone knows instead of what they can actually do.

Key Insights

• Self-assessment fails in one direction: people rate themselves about one stage above where evidence puts them, almost every time.
• Recognizing a system, describing it, and running it are three completely different skill levels. Most teams stop at number two.
• You can’t see the rung above the one you’re standing on, which is why the gap stays invisible from inside the team.
• A team conversation is not an assessment. It settles on whoever speaks first with the most conviction, not whoever actually knows.
• Applied work is the only honest evidence of maturity. Real analysis of a real organization beats any self-rating.
• The fix isn’t more information. It’s structured practice with feedback from someone who can see what you can’t.

I bought the tension ring because my amazing crocheting friends promised it would fix everything. If you’ve been reading along, you already know about my crochet saga. 

What you don’t know is that for months, I was convinced my problem was equipment. 

I mean, it couldn’t be my skills, right? That would mean admitting early defeat. 

I had dreams of making a beautiful, cozy blanket, but never got there because my stitches were all over the place. 

Truth, I couldn’t even finish a whole row before I ripped it out.

I was sooooo frustrated. I expected perfection out of the gate. 

So, I bought the cute, little metal flower-looking ring you slide onto your finger to keep the yarn feeding evenly. And I expected to get good.

And waited.

And waited.

Nothing! No real progress. Just more frustration.

What finally fixed it was the pro at the local yarn shop who watched me work for maybe 90 seconds and said, very kindly, that my tension wasn’t the problem. 

My grip was. I’d been holding the hook like a pencil instead of a knife, and every single stitch was landing at a slightly different angle and size because of it.

Here’s what stuck with me. I had been practicing wrong for months, confidently, while actively trying to get better. 

I bought the tool. I watched the videos. I put in the hours. And I could not see what was wrong, because seeing it required a skill I didn’t have yet.

That’s the whole problem with self-assessment. 

It’s also, I think, the reason the PESO Model® Maturity Ladder data looks the way it does.

Confidence Shows Up Before Competence

There’s an adult learning model I’ve used in nearly every training program I’ve built, across pharma, healthcare, and wellness, and now here. The four stages of adult learning are unconscious incompetence, conscious incompetence, conscious competence, and unconscious competence.

Most people assume the hard stage is the third one, conscious competence, the day-to-day grind. 

It isn’t. 

The hard stage is the first one, because unconscious incompetence is invisible from the inside. 

And here’s what makes it genuinely tricky: stage one and stage four feel similar. 

Both feel easy. 

Both feel confident. 

Both produce a person who says “yeah, I’ve got this” without hesitating. 

The only reliable difference is how the output looks, and most of us never actually look critically at it.

I watched this pattern repeat for years, well before I ever heard of the PESO Model. 

Years ago, I ran launch training for a manufacturing team of about 200 people. 

New product, new delivery system, new manufacturing process, the kind of launch where getting it wrong isn’t a coaching moment, it’s potentially a regulatory one.

We closed the program with a confidence survey, because, well, that’s what everybody did back then. 

Ninety-something percent said they felt ready. Amazing. 

I remember feeling pretty good about our team’s work.

Then we monitored the production data.

About a third of the team made some minor mistakes. Not big ones, but things that slowed down production. 

Not because they’d skipped the training. 

They’d all passed the assessment. They could recite the new process and requirements perfectly when asked. 

They just couldn’t do it live when production was running, and the launch date was looming.

Nobody lied on that survey. They answered honestly about what they could remember. 

Here’s the thing: the survey never asked them what they could do. It asked them to recite what they had learned.

The takeaway isn’t that people lie on surveys. 

They didn’t. 

They answered honestly against the picture of the work they could currently see. 

That picture was just incomplete, and nothing in their day-to-day told them so.

The Diagnostic Numbers Say the Same Thing

The PESO Model® Diagnostic was designed to see whether the PESO Model Maturity Ladder held up against real data. 

It did, and then some. 

Ninety-one percent of the teams that took it scored at Scale or below. 

Zero reached the top. ZERO.

And the number I keep coming back to: 68% said they run PESO as a system, and every one of them scored in the bottom two stages, Foundation or Pilot. 

Not most of them. All of them.

The crime isn’t being at Foundation. 

The crime is being at Foundation while telling yourself you’re at Scale. 

Now, let’s add the learning half of the answer, because I don’t think those 68% are trying to fool anyone on purpose.

Understanding runs at three different levels, and we tend to collapse them into one.

The first level is recognition. 

You see the four channels on a slide, and they make sense. Paid, earned, shared, owned. Of course. You’ve been doing all four for years. 

The second level is description. You can explain the model to someone else. You can say what each channel is for. You can put it in a deck and answer questions about it without sweating. 

The third level is operation. You can run it under real conditions when the budget gets cut, and the launch moves, and the one person who understood the measurement plan is out sick or takes a job somewhere else.

Almost everyone who takes the Diagnostic is solidly at level two. 

Level two feels like mastery because, in most professional settings, it’s what gets rewarded. 

You get promoted for explaining things well. Nobody audits whether the thing you explained is actually running. 

Sidebar… I had a colleague once who was brilliant at presenting and selling her team’s numbers to leadership, absolutely brilliant. Talk to her team, well, let’s just say the “behind the scenes” didn’t tell the same story.

So people answer “yes, we run PESO as a system,” and what they mean, accurately, is “I understand PESO as a system.” 

Those are very different sentences. 

The Diagnostic is just the first thing many teams encounter that can set the answers apart.

A Team Conversation Is Not an Assessment

The most common fix is to get the team in a room and hash it out honestly. 

I love that instinct. 

I’ve also watched it fail more times than I can count, and the reason is structural, not personal.

Put eight people in a room and ask where the team sits on a maturity ladder, and the answer doesn’t come from the evidence. 

It comes from whoever speaks first with the most conviction. Especially if it is a senior person or a respected colleague,

Everyone else adjusts toward that number because a room has social physics, and disagreeing with the confident person costs something. 

The junior team member who’s actually closest to the work and who knows the measurement plan is held together by a spreadsheet and hope is the least likely person in that room to say so out loud.

However, there’s also a quieter problem. 

Nobody wants to be the person who nominates their own team for a lower standing. 

That’s not cowardice. 

That’s an accurate read of how self-reported ratings tend to get used in performance conversations later.

I unintentionally did this to a room myself, years ago. 

We were assessing our learning function against a new capability model. 

I was the most senior person in the room, and I went first, which was mistake number one. 

I said we were at a four out of five on measurement because I could point to dashboards I’d built.

Everyone after me landed on four or five. 

Fastest consensus meeting I ever ran.

Weeks later, my Six Sigma green belt came to me with a spreadsheet showing that two of those dashboards were pulling from a source that had been deprecated a year earlier. 

WHAT? UGH!

Nobody had caught it because we weren’t actually using the data to make decisions. 

She’d known something was off for a while. But never said anything.

She told me later that she almost spoke up in that meeting, then decided she must be missing something because everyone senior to her sounded so sure.

That one still stings. 

I didn’t ask for her read. I gave mine and then asked everyone to agree with it. 

The fix may seem boring, but it works: use an instrument, not a meeting.

Applied Work Is the Only Thing that Settles it

Here’s the design principle underneath everything I build: if you want to know whether someone can do the work, the only reliable evidence is, well, the work. 

Not a score on a knowledge check. That only says they remember it soon after learning it. 

Not attendance. They sat in the room or on the call. 

Not a completion certificate…they were present in a browser tab.

It’s why every person at Spin Sucks completes the PESO Model Certification®, exercises and all, with no exemptions, not even for those who helped build it. 

I found out exactly how load-bearing that rule is when I went through it myself. 

I had read every script multiple times, built the workbooks, and reviewed every exercise. 

I was solidly, comfortably at level two. 

Then owned media went beautifully, and earned media took me apart.

That’s the certification doing its actual job. 

It isn’t just a course about knowing the operating system. 

It makes you build and run one, which means the gap between what you understand and what you can execute becomes visible to you, in writing. 

Humbling is the feature.

We designed the university curriculum around the same problem, but one step further upstream. 

That gap is exactly what we built it to close, which is why it climbs 100, 200, 300, and 400 instead of being a single course that hands you a certificate for showing up. 

Each level is designed to ask for something the previous one didn’t. 

You don’t succeed by accumulating knowledge. 

You succeed by proving you can apply it, and the levels are stacked so that the proof gets harder to demonstrate as you go.

It starts gently. 

100 level is fluency: the vocabulary, the four media types, and the way Paid, Earned, Shared, and Owned actually feed into each other rather than sit in separate silos. 

The 200 level takes that fluency and puts it to work, moving from “I can define it” to “I can use it in a scenario.” 

So far, so good. 

This is roughly the altitude where a lot of teams stop in real life, fluent, confident, and quietly convinced they’re a stage further along than they are. 

Fluency feels like mastery right up until someone asks you to do something with it.

The 300-level stops asking about scenarios and points the lens at a real organization.

Students diagnose a real, publicly facing org against the model, not a tidy teaching case with a clean answer key, but the messy, real thing, where the paid may be underfunded, the earned may be aspirational, and the owned is a website nobody’s touched since spring. 

This is the level where the inflated self-rating goes to die, because diagnosis is unforgiving in a way that recognition never is. 

You cannot wave off a maturity read. You either see the gaps, or you don’t.

Finally, the 400 level closes the loop, the only way applied learning ever really can: students build a full integrated campaign, end to end, across all four media types, as one connected plan. 

Not a summary of what a good campaign would include. The plan itself.

So, when a team rates its PESO Model® maturity one stage too high, it isn’t a character flaw. 

It’s what happens when you assess knowledge and call it capability. 

The whole point of the curriculum arc is to make that substitution impossible, to walk you from “I know what this is” all the way to “I diagnosed a real org and built the campaign,” so that by the time you rate your maturity, you’re rating something you’ve actually done. 

That’s the difference between a number you hope is true and one you’ve earned.

What to Do Monday (And Beyond)

Here’s where most teams stop: they run the three-question exercise I’m about to describe, get their honest answer, nod at the data, and then go right back to their self-rated stage in the next planning meeting. 

The exercise works. 

The follow-through is what matters.

Try this before your next planning conversation. 

Don’t announce a conclusion first. 

Send every person on your team the same three questions and ask them to answer independently, without discussing it: 

1. Where are we on the ladder? 
2. What’s the one piece of evidence you’d point to? 
3. What would have to be true for us to be one stage higher?

Then put the answers side by side. 

The stage everyone lands on is interesting. 

The spread is the actual diagnosis. 

If your director says Systemize and your coordinator says Foundation, you don’t have a maturity problem yet; you have a visibility problem, and those two get fixed in a completely different order. 

If everyone lands in the same place and the evidence column is thin across the board, that’s your answer too.

Whatever you find, resist rounding up. 

Almost everyone’s instinct is to give themselves the benefit of the doubt by exactly one rung, and the data says that instinct is wrong at a remarkably consistent rate.

I crocheted badly for months with a tool on my finger and full confidence in my technique. 

What I needed wasn’t another video. It was ninety seconds of somebody watching me work who knew what to look for.

What Now?

Once you know where you actually sit, the next question shifts. 

You’re no longer asking “Are we doing PESO?” 

You’re asking, “How do we move from understanding it to running it operationally?” 

That’s where the gap closes.

If you’re an individual practitioner or a smaller team that needs to build the capability in-house, the PESO Model Certification is designed exactly for this. It’s not another course that validates what you already know. 

It’s hands-on work in a real operating system where you build, integrate, measure, and run your own campaign across all four media types. 

You’ll discover what you actually know, where the gaps are, and what it takes to fill them. 

No exemptions. No shortcuts. The humbling part is the point.

If you’re a university faculty member, dean, or department chair looking to prepare your students before they enter the field, the university curriculum partnership is designed to address this exact problem. Reach out to us via email.

It climbs from fluency through applied organizational diagnosis to full campaign integration, level by level, across 100, 200, 300, and 400. 

By the time students finish the 400 level, they’re not theorizing about PESO maturity. They’ve diagnosed real organizations and built real campaigns. That’s the evidence that matters, and it’s what positions them as leaders upon graduation.

If you’re an enterprise team or in-house department ready to move from understanding to operating, Spin Sucks partnerships are built exactly for this. 

The maturity assessment is where we start. From there, we work with you to design and implement an integrated operating system that fits your specific context, constraints, and timeline. 

We do the diagnosis. We identify the gaps. We build solutions around your budget, your team, and your business reality. 

That’s a consulting or training engagement, and it’s how teams actually close the gap between knowing and doing. Interested in closing the gap, reach out.

But here’s what matters most: don’t skip the honest reckoning. Run the three-question exercise. Look at the spread. Name where you actually are. Everything that comes next depends on that clarity.

If you run the three questions with your team, I’d like to know what the spread looked like. That number tells me more about where a team really is than the stage ever does.

© 2026 Spin Sucks. All rights reserved. The PESO Model is a registered trademark of Spin Sucks.

Source link