Blogs & Speeches
Scale is the most confusing word in social change
What does the word scale mean when it comes to social change? This piece explores four different ways of thinking about scale by connecting scale’s idea of “small and big” to “fast and slow.”
Not long ago I was sitting in the courtyard of a pleasant city cafe in inner Sydney when a colleague from a big Australian NGO leaned over and said in a hushed but determined tone, that we needed to scale. I nodded. But looking back I wish I had brought more curiosity to the conversation. I could have asked, what did she mean by scale? Did she want more people, more change, action in more places? Did it have to be fast? Did she mean something else?
The question of how we might scale social change is a genuine mystery but it is also faddishly desired. In order to imagine how we might ‘scale’ social change we need to first take back the term ‘scale’ from the corporate startups who made it famous…
Citation:
Tattersall, Amanda (2022) Scale is the most confusing word in social change. Sydney: Medium.
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