Holding it all lightly…hugging our dreams tightly — scaling ‘rightly’
There is much debate and controversy…push and pull… on the subject of scaling.
Discerning how scale matters…matters a whole lot!
Many vehemently maintain that scaling up is essential to gain enough impact, given the magnitude and complexity of problems on a planet with almost eight billion people.
Hmm…
🔹 What kind of impacts are being accelerated?
🔹 What are our roles, rights and responsibilities regarding the ways we approach impact, to seemingly solve complex systemic problems?
When we dig deeper we understand that there are much healthier and systemic ways to approach scale and growth.
Some are aligned with the principles of nature…
Some will push us and are pushing us further out of balance — hastening human suffering, domination-oppression colonizing patterns and planetary degradation and destabilization.
We are using the terms right scaling, scaling out, scaling deep and scaling up thoughtfully and with care.
Yes…scale matters.
There are two superb papers that unpack scaling in ways that align with the life-affirming patterns that we support. The perspectives and models offered can be applied (trans)contextually and can work synergistically with a wide variety of processes and methodologies.
They reflect state-of-the-art learning that underlies our unstitutional commons evolutionary navigation and many collaborative initiatives underway in various places and spaces.
Both papers articulate a holistic living system approach to scale:
🔹 Conceptually and intuitively well-grounded and researched
🔹 How we think about scale…
🔹 Recognizing the multidimensional ways to scale and their interconnections…
🔹 How right scaling can guide our strategic and emergent navigation towards systemic change…
🔹 How deep scaling — often undervalued and underfunded — nurtures the relational connective tissue vital for deep-rooted sustainable shifts
These aren’t binary either-or views of scale.
And-and…
They help us discern patterns, at a conscious level — understanding what is needed, at what stages and why — how to approach scale.
Tatiana Fraser of Systems Sanctuary shines a much needed spotlight on The Art of Deep Scaling:
“Endless growth is not sustainable and our urgency to try to fix the problem and seek solutions may be part of the crisis we are in. One unintended consequence of this has been that another type of scale has been devalued and as a result, under-resourced. It’s a scale that values the slow steady work of deepening relationships. It recognizes the significance of context, building connections that bridge diverse communities and it prioritizes inner work and healing as integral components of the scaling process. We call this type of scale ‘Scaling Deep’ and we believe that adequately supporting it, and funding it, holds the greatest potential for long lasting systemic change.”
Griffiths Centre for Social Innovation sharpens our contextual lens with Everyday Patterns for Shifting Systems: Right Scaling looking across the dimensions of scaling up, scaling deep, scaling out, and scaling big. It considers what it might take to embed new patterns across systems, structures, practices, spaces and interactions, behaviours, mindsets and values. (Right Scaling is one of seven patterns covered in their excellent series.)
“Right scaling is about disrupting our conventional ideas about scale and impact. It is about bringing together what is conventionally understood as big and little scale; it is about being able to work with the particular and the general at the same time. Right scaling refers to ways of working that help us to connect lived realities with decision-making that occurs about, but often away from those realities. It is about understanding scale at human and systems infrastructure level as equally important AND different. Right scaling means working within systems in ways that let us move more fluidly between big and small, wide and deep, recognise the connections between them and appreciate the different lenses they provide to our understanding of wellbeing.”
On a finite planet, there are limits to growth. The laws of nature prevail.
Reductionist cookie-cutter replication of strategies and solutions invariably perpetuate the same patterns that created the overlapping systemic problems we are facing.
In contrast, promising strategies and alternatives developed locally — bioregionally — can be adapted and applied more widely.
Observing the patterns and lessons learned, there are many ways to scale deep and out, building momentum and drawing from local, bioregional collaborative initiatives and coalition work.
Rather than throw funds, resources and energy at shiny big bang projects that chronically over-promise and under-deliver, often with negative downstream consequences, scaling criteria that is context-based and place-sourced makes much more sense. When living system right-scaling patterns are understood, investment decisions can potentially become wiser.
Collaborative communities, initiatives and coalition work can begin anywhere and as the work evolves it can amplify and travel anywhere. There’s a need for many living lab pilots and initiatives that cultivate learning and provide real demonstrations, with qualitative and quantitative indicators that can guide right scaling potential. These can take place, spawn and scale in a variety of multi-directional ways, locally and globally — glocal.
Many initiatives begin on the ground as focused local, bioregional, rural, urban, neighbourhood and/or community initiatives.
Some initiatives might begin as overarching global theme-based social systemic issues. When learnings are shared, they can potentially be adapted, spawning anywhere in the world as grounded place-sourced work.
Local and global work can also get underway in parallel. Learnings gained are emergent — the cross pollinating occurring in iterative, organic ways.
Learnings gained, documented and demonstrated through collaborative partnership — participatory action research and storytelling — can potentially be applied and adapted in other local efforts anywhere in the world. As learning deepens, we are better equipped to address systemic social, environmental and economic needs and challenges within and across contexts. Beyond incremental tinkering, we can potentially move towards more transcontextual transformative shifts.
As we (learn to) work in integrated coherent ways, we combine and span global perspectives with local inhabitants — based on local needs, cultures, knowledge, Indigenous wisdom traditions and gifts differing. Our combined learning might be adapted for ever-widening world needs. The term glocal truly and meaningfully can come to life.
When we navigate wisely — a dance that is organic and by design — we can gain more traction, go wider and deeper and potentially advance life-affirming regenerative progress and positive impact.
To navigate well, we are always living the questions and learning and adapting along the way, taking care not to leap to assumptions or extrapolate without understanding the important and sometimes subtle cultural, ecological and socioeconomic differences and needs that call for variations and alternative strategies.
Daniel Christian Wahl regularly addresses the dilemma of scale in his ongoing work, as described in this article: Nurturing vital diversity & resilience: Scaling out, rather than scaling-up!
“Many regenerative solutions will no longer be regenerative if they are simply scaled up into a mega-project or replicated in a cut & paste (cookie cutter) fashion. Such expansionist approaches tend to lose touch with the necessity for solutions to be born out of the cultural and ecological uniqueness of a place — its people and its bioregion. We can learn from the patterns of natural systems how to design as nature, create place-sourced solutions and create conditions conducive to life.”
The sharing of stories and (trans)contextual insights helps us collectively integrate learning, gain wisdom and evaluate what can be amplified and applied more widely.
In our article building on The Great Simplification Episode | Nate Hagens & Gaya Herrington | Humanity’s Soul: Life or Growth?, Gaya tracks the trajectory from The Club of Rome Limits to Growth findings spearheaded by Donella Meadows over 50 years ago, to the current and ongoing climate crisis — the real and predictable effects of unlimited [material] growth on a finite planet.
Yup. Scale seriously matters…It is no surprise that E.F. Schumacher’s books are also making a comeback — Small is Beautiful: Economics as if People matter. Need to move away from myopically scaling up in business as if bigger is always better. Wrong scaling that delivers runaway damaging impact, is bankrupt of meaningful value in society. People are increasingly pushing back, as imperatives for sensible scale, valuing the right things — [slowly] sink in. The expression, ‘Better late than never,’ more prescient than ever!”
At this point…we are all late adopters — an ongoing learning journey for all. We continue to wrestle with the navigation challenges we face in these two articles:
🔹 Being ‘Roughly Right’ is ‘Always’ and is ‘Never’… ‘Good Enough’
🔹 Holding the Tension of Less is More
In a sub-chapter of his book, Designing Regenerative Cultures, Daniel Christian Wahl puts scale into proportional perspective — Sensitivity to scale, uniqueness of place and local culture:
…“We need to co-create diverse models for systemic solutions at a local and regional scale. Some of them will inform through their successes and others through their failures. Repetitive failure and experimentation at a small scale can help us to learn faster. … The response time and cycles of transformative innovation can be faster at the local scale. If you want to effectively adapt to and influence economic, social, cultural and environmental change, start with small-scale experiments that give you quick feedback as to what works and what doesn’t. Deeper questioning into the underlying real or perceived needs that make us identify and frame the ‘problem’ in the first place might lead us to discover that we are treating symptoms rather than causes. …”
The lessons of history and hindsight regularly teach us that we are wise to stay deeply humble along the way. Outdated theories of growth and change and engrained dysfunctional norms that continue to misguide and jeopardize the trajectory of human civilization — have taken and continue to take their toll. The modern competitive consumer-driven Industrial Age that mechanized scale, institutionalized colonizing domination-oppression patterns.
It’s time to break from those degenerative patterns.
In this Regeneration Rising Podcast with Nisha Mary Poulouse, Graham Boyd unpacks available pathways to build a regenerative economy. He builds bridges between multiple concepts — regeneration, capitalism, business and economics — and explores enabling, adaptive scaffolding needed for transformative societal shifts. Graham uncovers myths about companies — the legal aspects — and connects all this to apartheid, freedoms and democracy. He focuses on regeneration — connecting consciousness and the meaning of a conscious company — related to intelligence and regenerative conditions conducive for life…
Interdependent mutually invested entities collaborating toward common[s] purpose at the nested interdependent ecosystem layers can grow deeper resilient regenerative roots — what Indigenous cultures have always understood. Herein lies vitally enabling contextual conditions and building blocks available to help us navigate the difficult transition from the degenerative and fragile realities of Horizon 1 and 2, toward regenerative Horizon 3 circular economies.
“Conscious capitalism is more about consciousness and less about capitalism” ~ Graham Boyd
In this article, another excerpted subchapter from his book, Daniel Christian Wahl elaborates on Scale-linking, salutogenic design for resilience.
…“How do we design for resilience at the scale of our communities and bioregions, as well as nationally and globally?”…
…“Salutogenic design aims to facilitate the emergence of health at and across all scales of the whole. It recognizes the inextricable link between human, ecosystem and planetary health. Rather than primarily focusing on the relief of symptoms of disease or ill-health, this approach tries to promote positive health and a flourishing of the whole.”
In other words, the aim of salutogenic design is to support healthy individuals in healthy communities acting responsibly in healthy societies to nurture and maintain healthy ecosystem functioning as the basis for healthy bioregions and ultimately a healthy biosphere. Scale-linking, salutogenic design aims to create resilient and regenerative systems at and across all scales.”
When we know better, surely we must scale better — for the sake of humanity and the living planet we call home!
Most of the references included here [and in many of our articles] convey a need to widen our contextual lens — to access and combine all our senses, sense-making and left and right brain capacities. As we peel back more layers we can learn how to dance with systems, complexity, paradox and our inherent messyhumanness.
As we rethink what we mean by scale, we can appreciate the nestedness of all life and living processes as integrally interconnected, entangled and interdependent parts and wholes. We can also rethink and reframe what we mean by intelligence…
Deepening our understanding of intelligence beyond component parts — we are challenged to embody our co-intelligence, as Tom Atlee explores and implores in his superb new book Co-intelligence: The Applied Wisdom of Wholeness, Interconnectedness, and Co-Creativity.
Herein we might co-discover wider, far-reaching co-resonance that can enrich our ongoing regenerative learning journey toward interbecoming wiser and a whole lot more humble — living into an unknowable future as we endeavour to shape and scale life-affirming patterns. Co-intelligence widens our eyes, illuminating patterns and pathways available that far exceed the narrow band of any single discipline, movement or worldview. Tom’s book synthesizes decades of research and work building from the wise democracy pattern language. Retrospective and forward-facing, we can all gain and expand our relational and sense making capacity, co-activating co-intelligence as engaged participants in our wiser human evolution — within the contexts of ongoing every day work and life!
*This article was updated again May 2024, reflecting additional perspectives and ongoing action research, as we continue to observe, listen, assimilate, curate and adapt.
Unstitution was birthed as a collective creative commons and nested ecosystem. We (co-)catalyze and support collaborative communities, initiatives and coalitions where people from across sectors, disciplines, cultures, generations and walks-of-life work together on mission critical issues. From readiness through to regenerative progress — moving beyond polarization — is how we roll. The links embedded throughout this article are a warm invitation to go a bit deeper, at any time. For more insights reflecting our ongoing journey, our suite of Unstitution articles are published on Medium. They portray a small sample of the ways we are adapting and contributing among ever-expanding commons-based communities and initiatives inspired and fuelled by citizens — perhaps better described as denizens — anywhere in the world — living into the principles and spirit that govern our collaborative work.
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