Scale and sustain

Introduction

I don't have much hands-on experience with scale. I have a lot of experience with sustainability, but most of that experience has ended in failure. In spite of that, this note is going to make some very close links between scaleability and sustainability.

Here is an assertion:

Local Response by its very nature is not a good candidate for scale. I say that because when I look at the world's great successes with scaleability, they have either:

strong central control: for example, the Roman Catholic Church

strong 'protocol' control: for example, the Internet. Everything that moves across the Internet does so in exactly the same way i.e. it uses the same protocol.

Local Response, by its very definition, rejects these 2 ways of looking at the world.

Here is a hypothesis:

When I looked at successful examples of scale, I find that they are also sustainable. Perhaps scaleability and sustainability are 2 sides of the same coin. Scaleability is sustainability in space. Sustainability is scaleability is time. If you get one right, then you are probably well on the way to getting the other right.

Here is an example:

A Knowledge Fair or a Learning Festival is an exercise both in scaleability and sustainability. This is what we see. Those who practice CLCP find their enthusiasm renewed. That is sustainability. The renewed enthusiasm of those who practice CLCP is the conduit by which the approach is transferred to new practitioners. That is scaleability.

Here is what I have learned from experience:

A process is sustainable (in the absence of hierarchical control) when the process is owned by the community. The community owns the process when the community sees value in the process. A community sees value in the process when the community sees that it delivers value. (To put some humanity in this analysis, I can never get out of my mind the grandmother in The Gambia declaring, 'Since we started to do this, not a single child in our villages has died (from malaria).' She owned that process.)

In NGO language, this is about 'Measurement and Evaluation': in the wiser words of Deming, it is about 'checking'. So the community checks to find out if the process is delivering value, and if it is then it will continue to milk the cow. (So the grandmother in The Gambia was used to seeing about 6 children die in the villages each year and this year no child had died. That is 'checking' or it is 'measurement and evaluation'. The value was 6 children.)

Here is what I guess:

When the community sees the process as a source of value, it talks to others about this remarkable thing (unless they see the outcome as a zero-sum game?) In formal terms, it is a Knowledge Fair. In informal terms, it is any opportunity to learn-and-share.

Here are my starting points to think about scale in CLCP:

1. Ownership of process by community.
2. Conviction by the community of value. They do this by checking on their progress.
3. Create opportunities to learn-and-share at local, regional, national and international levels.

I think that all we really have to do is to formalise our approach to measurement (as we have done in Congo) and then to lift our horizons about the possibilities of learning-and-sharing at local and regional levels.