At a recent session in our Curious Conversations series, our Alumni came together to share and explore their curiosity about scaling, about how to do it sustainably and about the wicked problems from which the need to scale is born.
When should we scale? How can we maintain the quality of our programmes and work when we do? How can our systems cope with growing demand? What role do relationships and collaborations play? How can we mitigate burn out?
Because the contexts in which we work and live are so different, scale means different things and looks different to everyone. Our motivations and needs for scale may be different – whether scaling up, out or deep – but in sharing and learning from one another’s experiences, it became clear that for scaling in any situation to be sustainable, to be agile and adaptable for different contexts, it must be centred on relationships.
Relationships with others in your organisation, your collaborators, partners, beneficiaries, and community. And these relationships must, in turn, be grounded in a shared ethos and principles and they must emphasise agency.
Doing so enables a rich and rapid learning of your offering, ensures a sense of shared value and identity with all actors, and mitigates the risk of beneficiary dependency, which works to prevent burn out and ultimately, increase sustainability.
From here, we can draw on continuous quality improvement and assessments to build a shared practice, measure engagement points and adoption of new practices more meaningfully, and work towards a sustained and embodied change in the attitudes and ways of being and doing things of our partners and communities that creates an established yet agile channel through which both current and future “innovations” can be scaled.
This session, and larger series, was borne from a request by an Alumna, Ash Hesse (Cohort 2) from Waves for Change who is exploring the use of ed-tech to scale. She was looking for a way to connect with others doing similar work. It was an informal and collaborative workshop to which we invited Alumni to bring their curious questions and challenges relating to scaling and sustainability and dive deeply into these with the help of their peers. The session was co-designed and co-facilitated by Ash.