Why Scaling Matters
Why Scaling Matters
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“We are winning battles but losing the war.”
We’ve all seen projects that deliver brilliant results - for a place, a community, a moment in time. But when we zoom out, something’s not adding up. The scale of our impact still doesn’t match the scale of the problems we’re trying to solve.
That’s the challenge of our time. And it’s why scaling matters.
The Ambition Gap
We know where we need to go. WWF is guided by Roadmap 2030 and the Sustainable Development Goals. We have ambitious and essential goals for nature and people by 2030.
Across the network, teams are working really hard. There have been real successes, and no shortage of dedication. But most of our efforts are still too small, too local, or too tied to short-term structures to create the lasting change we need.
We’re not on track.
This is the ambition gap - the growing distance between the scale of the problems we face and the current scale of impact trajectory of our responses.
This gap is a call to action - we need to do something different.
Scaling by Design:
If we want impact at scale, we need to design for it. And that starts by recognising that there is a difference between ‘impactful’ and ‘scalable’.
Our friends at The Nature Conservancy use a simple analogy to make this point:
Imagine that your intention is to start a pizzeria. You decide to run a pilot by having your whole family over for a pizza party.
At home, you organise everything around that one evening. The ingredients, tools, and time all work to deliver a few great pizzas. But if your goal is to produce 400 pizzas a night, like a real pizzeria, that same setup won’t get you there.
The pilot worked—for a family meal. But it didn’t test what actually needed testing. The kitchen, the process, the equipment, the staff, the price point. You weren’t piloting for scale. You were piloting for quality in a controlled setting.
If your goal was to feed hundreds of people night after night, you ran the wrong kind of pilot. Because it wasn’t about the pizza. It should have been about the pizza AND the delivery model.
And that’s the trap many projects fall into. We build and test something small, prove it works in one place, and assume it can scale. But if we didn’t test the right things—if we didn’t design with scale in mind—then we’re not actually any closer to delivering impact at the size required.
Business as usual tends to focus on what’s possible with today’s funding, today’s team, and today’s constraints. But scaling requires us to think ahead. To build solutions that are realistic, replicable, and able to live beyond us—taken on by others, funded by others, and embedded into systems.
In short:
A few great pizzas aren’t enough if your goal is to feed hundreds.
The solution might work but the setup won’t scale.
Designing for scale means piloting the delivery model, not just the intervention.
So… Why Does Scaling Matter?
Because the challenges are big and the clock is ticking.
Because doing more of the same won’t close the ambition gap.
Because small projects, no matter how excellent, won’t shift the system unless they’re built to scale.
Because we don’t just need more good pizzas - we need working pizzerias.
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