Dear Reader,
Over the past few weeks, I have written about strategy, scale, ecosystems and designing for scale.
As I look back over those ideas, I keep coming back to one conclusion.
The biggest barriers to scale are rarely technical.
More often, they are human.
They are institutional.
And they are far harder to solve.
Scale requires trade offs
One of the hardest lessons about working through public systems is that you rarely get everything you want.
Scale requires compromise.
Sometimes that means simplifying a model that performed brilliantly in a pilot.
Sometimes it means working through existing government structures rather than creating parallel ones.
Sometimes it means prioritising affordability over optimisation.
Sometimes it means accepting slower progress than you would choose.
And sometimes it means accepting "good enough" implementation today because it creates the conditions for something much better tomorrow.
None of that feels comfortable, particularly when you care deeply about quality and impact.
But the organisations that achieve lasting scale are usually remarkably clear about one thing.
What is essential.
And what can adapt.
Without that clarity, it becomes very difficult to move from being a successful project to becoming part of the system itself.
Scaling is rarely linear
Another reason scaling feels so difficult is that progress almost never follows a straight line.
For long periods, it can feel painfully slow.
Budgets take time.
Policies stall.
Leaders move on.
Procurement is delayed.
It often feels like two steps forward and one step back.
Then, almost without warning, the conditions change.
A political champion emerges.
A policy window opens.
Government is ready to move.
And suddenly the challenge is no longer how to maintain momentum.
It is whether you are ready to move quickly enough to seize the opportunity.
The organisations that succeed learn to operate in both realities.
Patient enough for the long game.
Prepared enough for moments of acceleration.
The behaviour change we rarely talk about
Social impact rightly spends a great deal of time thinking about behaviour change.
Usually among the people we serve.
Patients. Parents. Farmers. Teachers. Health workers.
But lasting scale often depends on a different kind of behaviour change.
Institutional behaviour change.
It means leaders using data differently.
Managers supporting and holding teams accountable differently.
Budgets being allocated differently.
Departments collaborating differently.
Decisions being made differently.
In my experience, this is often the hardest behaviour change of all.
Not because people do not care.
But because institutions are shaped by incentives, politics, history, culture, habits and competing priorities.
Changing a process is relatively straightforward.
Changing how an institution consistently behaves is something else entirely.
The real work of scale
Perhaps one reason scale takes longer than organisations and funders hope is that we underestimate what it really demands.
Not just better programmes.
Not just stronger evidence.
Not just more funding.
It requires institutions to think differently, make decisions differently, allocate resources differently and ultimately behave differently.
That work is often invisible.
It can take years. Sometimes decades.
Yet when it succeeds, it creates something far more valuable than project level impact.
It creates the conditions for impact to endure.
The organisations I most admire are not necessarily those with the fastest growth curves.
They are the ones willing to do the difficult work of changing systems from the inside.
Patient enough to stay the course.
Pragmatic enough to make trade offs.
And ambitious enough to believe that institutions really can change.
Warmly,
Liz
Strategic Advisor | Former CEO | Founder, Volante
Based in Kenya, available globally
