Right Scaling
7 everyday patterns to shift systems
This piece is part of exploratory work we have been doing into everyday patterns, and the role and power of re-patterning in systems change with friends and peers at The Southern Initiative and Auckland Co-design Lab. In our introduction we shared seven patterns we have identified across our work and that of others that go some way to making visible active re-patterning for equity and powersharing. Here we examine the seventh one: Right Scaling.
This piece was written across 2022/2023 and reflects our thinking at this time.
This pattern is about scaling multi-dimensionally, scaling deeper, and connecting different scales to work together for wellbeing. The idea of scale and scaling is an important aspect of how the public sector thinks about achieving impact across regions and at a national level.
Right Scaling Policy makers and funders are often focused on how activities or interventions can be brought to ‘scale’ which is assumed to be the best way to create impact. This usually refers to making something bigger, scaling it ‘up’ to impact policy, or replicating something across a number of places, scaling ‘out’. Things that happen at population or national levels are thought of as representing what it means to work ‘at scale’.
Things that happen at the level of whānau, locality, or in particular places are generally thought of as discrete, bespoke, small or local in scale and are often considered as less efficient or effective as a result. There is an implicit hierarchy in this. Bigger scale policy and investment decisions are seen to be more important than smaller scale practice or operational decisions.
Similarly the overall general population impact seen through numbers or “at scale” often takes precedence over what those numbers represent in terms of the specific impact or experiences of particular people. This is played out in the hierarchy of quantitative over qualitative evidence and research. Yet they are both important but different lenses on impact — one goes wide, the other goes deep.
It is the norm at policy making level to work with abstractions, numbers and generalisations because this feels more workable than dealing with the particularities of different places and people.
Thinking about scale in this way however results in decision-making that is dislocated from people, place and context. 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.
It is also about reframing our understanding of the relationships between scale and impact. As noted, currently we assume scaling ‘something’ out is the most effective way to achieve impact. There is a fear that investing in going deep or taking the time to respond to the specificities of place is too costly.
Yet in reality, when we are working in spaces that are complex, or where inequity and trauma are embedded into structures, a universal focus on scaling out can hold us in shallow, generalised and surface ways of working that end up making little difference because they don’t change anything in any fundamental ways, or worse they reinforce the inequity of the status quo.
Right scaling means privileging the need to scale deep in order for innovation and transformation to occur. To be able to sit long enough, go deep enough to recognise and accept what is sitting underneath and to collectively grapple with what we find.
As part of scaling we need to support going deep into culture, people, history, healing, mindsets, values, world views, and the particular stories, characteristics and strengths of people and place. This includes stories of trauma, loss and harm, as acknowledging these is the only way for new connections, directions and patterns to be possible.
Scaling deep is imperative for grappling with and shifting the mental models and assumptions that underpin current patterns in the system. This is possible and plausible if we understand that scaling out, can mean not just the scaling of interventions and programmes, but also the scaling of conditions, principles, values and ways of being and doing.
Right scaling then, lets us work with small, big, national, local scale as equally important and connected, and on conditions for scaling deep as part of scaling up and out.
Read the full piece for two examples of Right Scaling in practice .
Core contributors to this piece
Ingrid Burkett
Penny Hagen
Angie Tangaere
Thank you also the many others who we talked with, and those who undertook the work we observed
