Beyond The Scaling Paradox: 3 Ways to Think About Scale

Hey changemaker,

Are you unsatisfied with small impact, but unsure how to grow without compromising your values?

Do your funders or partners push you to “scale,” but something about it feels off?

Are you afraid that in trying to help, you might do more harm than good?

This week, I’m sitting with a hard truth: I misunderstood what it means to “scale” an education innovation.

Measuring What Matters: Telling Stories of Impact Through The Data You Collect and Share

As co-founder of NABU, we designed systems to get mother-tongue books into the hands of millions of children. And we did. And it was awesome.

But now I see the limits of how we measured our success, and how we could have enriched our work by looking beyond adoption.

Adoption to us meant growth and usage of our mobile reading app, which has a profound impact on kids’ lives, but it wasn’t the whole story of our impact.

What you measure indicates what matters, to you and to your stakeholders. We focused so much on one single dimension of scale, without measuring other dimensions with the same rigor.

This sent a message to our community that adoption mattered most.

Yet to me, and to many of our team members and partners in the community, it was not adoption that was our north star.

It was not adoption that got us out of bed in the morning.

Or kept us working late into the night.

It was working with local authors and artists to create beautiful, original, mother tongue books.

What is the north star of your work?

We knew that by hiring, training and supporting local creators to publish mother tongue books in their own language, and sharing their own stories we were doing deep work that spiraled out creating many positive by-effects beyond our work.

We knew we were co-creating with artists a pioneering model of storytelling that would have profound impact for years (even generations) to come.

In hindsight, some of our most lasting impact came from deep, relational work: local illustrators sharing unique artworks, community members recording oral histories, children seeing their culture reflected on a page for the first time.

The heart of the scale paradox: human relationships are difficult to scale

Yet scaling a publishing model that relies on relationships of inclusivity, trust and respect is harder than scaling adoption of an app (or building more school buildings, or donating more medical supplies, for example).

This is the cruel paradox that many changemakers face when we try to scale interventions that truly work: the very qualities that make something effective (deep relationships, contextual adaptation, trust-building) become harder to maintain as we grow.

This tension sits at the heart of all work that seeks to truly impact large and seemingly intractable problems.

My belief is that if we have implemented a change that is proven to profoundly improve people’s lives, we must figure out how to scale it. 

But the how matters just as much as the how many.

So how do we scale what works?

Three different dimensions of scale: figuring out how to keep a birds’ eye perspective

First, we must recognize that the most transformative change doesn't scale in one direction. There are three dimensions of scale: deep, wide and up.

As your read these, think about which one resonates most with you. 

Reflect on ways that your social change work might be doing more than one of these at once:

DEEP: scale that is like a shell, spiraling inward to create lasting change

Think of a shell. As you look at it, your eyes spiral deeper and deeper. If you could keep going down, you would see incredible complexity at each level.

Changemakers doing deep social change work are often working to shift cultural values, mindsets, and relationships within and with people and communities.

They seek to make the world more just, fair and inclusive.

Think of women in their communities in Kenya who are seeking to end female genital mutilation, by shifting ideas about girl’s sexual purity.

The purpose of deep work is to make change inside-out—so beliefs, narratives, and values begin to subtly—and powerfully—shift.

WIDE: scale that is like a mycelial network, spreading across communities

Have you heard about trees sending nutrients to each other through the forest floor? This image represents scaling wide, spreading a program or product beyond the initial site.

This is the kind of scale we're most familiar with—what most people mean when they say "scale."

It's spreading a program or intervention across different communities or sites.

Think of NABU scaling adoption of our mother tongue reading app to children without access to books across multiple communities and countries. This is an example of wide scale.

UP: scale that is like a tree, growing up towards the sky to change whole systems

This dimension is often missed. It involves shifting institutional norms, policies, and systems—the "rules of the game."

Think about working to make change by re-writing laws, pursuing a political career to give a voice to the unheard, or advocating for political change.

Often we arrive here after deep or wide scale experiences, but some start at the policy or legal level and commit their lives to re-writing the rules of the system.

Key Takeaways for Practice

In practice, scale is not static but dynamic. We can work in multiple of these scale dimensions at once, or it may shift over time.

We may start scaling out like a mycelial network, only to realize we need to spiral deep into the problem to unravel it.

A typical path: we start by going deep on a problem, then discover opportunities to bring the work to other contexts (going wide).

Over time, our work spreads, we become known, and we're invited into forums where we shape policy that shifts the entire environment in positive ways (scaling up).

• Choose your scale model intentionally: Ask what works, for whom, when, and where.

• Invest in process, not just product: Relationships and context matter as much as materials.

• Build with the system, not over it: Elevate local actors and highlight what’s already working.

• Rethink your scaling goals: Impact isn’t just reach. Ask: how deep? how sustained?

• Lead like a cartographer: Your job isn’t to walk ahead—it’s to walk alongside, making the map visible to others.

The best changemakers are cartographers, who scale impact by mapping the landscape first

In stories about social impact at scale, we often hear about a heroic founder changing systems from the top.

But the job of the systems leader is not to be the hero—it's to be a cartographer. To map the terrain alongside communities. To be curious.

Our job is to identify “positive deviants”—people already doing the work well—and work together to co-create and amplify this impact.

We no longer have to ask, “How will it scale?”

Now we can ask: “What kind of scale are we building, with whom, and what is the change we are seeking?”