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Expanding Concepts of Scale
By Gord Tulloch
30 Jan 2018
People often ask if a social enterprise can be scaled. In this blog, Gord Tulloch challenges the idea that scale only means growing bigger or reaching more people. He explains five different ways to create impact, including changing rules, beliefs, social norms, and the conditions that help people take action.
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In this expanded framework, there are five pathways to achieving scale, which can also be understood as different ways of having impact.
- Scaling out, which focuses on broadening reach and replicating initiatives;
- Scaling up, which influences policy to create systemic change;
- Scaling deep, which shifts cultural beliefs and values;
- Scree-scaling, which supports diverse, localised solutions; and
- Scaling initial conditions, which creates environments that enable agency and innovation.
Together, these approaches offer a flexible, multi-dimensional view of scaling social impact, recognising that successful interventions may look different in various contexts.
More importantly, you'll learn how scale in the social sector isn’t just about expanding programs to reach more people. Instead, it’s about adapting solutions locally (“scree-scaling”), building supportive conditions for innovation, and valuing diverse, small-scale efforts that can transform systems over time. This broader view of scale emphasises long-term, community-centred change rather than just replicating models widely.
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