One tell from each of the five stages, in order. Answer yes and you carry to the next. Where you first answer no is where you stand today.
A scored reading is different work. A facilitator sits with your evidence, asks the same question of several people separately, and produces a stage, a heat map and priorities in the order they unblock each other. That is the approach. This page is the question a principal asks before it, which is where we are now.
The five stages are published in full, with the behaviour that identifies each, in the Governance Maturity Curve.
Not as it is written down, and not as it is meant to become. The honest answer is the one worth having.
Stage 1
One person decides, and the enterprise works because that person is good at it.
What it exposes
The exposure is not the founder's judgement, which is usually excellent. It is that the judgement has no successor and no record.
The move from here
Write down who decides what. A decision rights matrix on one page, agreed out loud by the people it names, is the first thing that survives the founder being unreachable.
Stage 2
There are meetings and there are reports, and both depend on whoever happens to run them.
What it exposes
This stage feels orderly from the inside, which is why families stay in it for a decade. Order that depends on particular people is not yet governance.
The move from here
Fix the thresholds in writing and minute the decision instead of the discussion. When two people give the same answer about what needs the board, the rules have stopped depending on who is asked.
Stage 3
The rules are written, and mostly followed.
What it exposes
Written rules with uneven observance produce a specific failure: everyone believes the system is working, so nobody checks.
The move from here
Make the record retrievable in a day. Every material decision carries the paper and the approval behind it, filed as it is taken and not assembled afterwards.
Stage 4
The architecture runs whether or not any particular person is in the room.
What it exposes
The work at this stage is no longer building. It is keeping, and keeping is harder to sustain because nothing visibly breaks when it stops.
The move from here
Hold the year when nothing is breaking. The work at this stage is keeping: the sittings attended, the registers read on a cycle, the operating rhythm measured against itself.
Stage 5
The record has itself become an asset, and the family governs across generations rather than within one.
What it exposes
Few enterprises of any kind reach this stage. Those that do tend to have treated the record as infrastructure for at least one full generational handover.
The move from here
Teach it. Precedent nobody is shown is precedent that dies with the people who set it, so the next generation is brought to the record before they need it.
You answered no to the first question. The curve begins at Founder-Led, because an enterprise that has never written anything down is already on it, so that is where these answers place you.
Five answers you gave yourself place you here. A facilitator working from your evidence often lands somewhere else, and the difference between the two is usually the most useful thing we learn.
The paper
One document. The curve in full, the architecture underneath it, and a worksheet to take into a room with other people. The paper is the same document for every reader. Your own placement travels in the letter.
Where the figure came from, what it actually counted, and the three questions that would tell a family where it really stands.
The succession most families have thought about is the shares. The one J.P. Morgan found missing is the people who run the place, and it is the one that stops an office within a week.