On the challenge of investing in impact at scale

In previous articles I’ve explored how we can maximise impact by aligning our efforts across three scales – that of the organisation, our programmes and the wider system. Now I want to turn to the meta-challenge of scale, often something of a holy grail from a funder’s perspective. What funders are really after by achieving impact at scale is maximum return on investment and therefore being able to demonstrate value for money, whether this is privately-funded philanthropy or taxpayer-funded Government spending. For any given investment, the route to increasing this return or value is by scaling the intervention or product. The more people that are helped through the funding, the wider a ‘proven solution’ is spread, and the more impact can be demonstrated.

This kind of value extraction by Western agencies and governments investing in countries of the Global South can in some respects be seen as a new form of colonialism which manifests as power over the recipient communities. These organisations are founded on a paternalistic and hierarchical mindset and follow the same kind of process: they decide what to invest in, they impose their own conditions, and they seek to maximise their investment through value creation and extraction. The hard work is done by local people who are then required to (a) report back on how well they have done this – without failure or fraud – and (b) offer up a plan as to how they will scale their solutions. Except you can only optimise for efficiency and economy when you have a degree of control over the variables at play. This works well in ordered systems. Perhaps your goal is to solve a problem with a clearly defined and tested solution, whether a process or product or programme. A new way of applying for your visa online, wells for clean water, new forms of rapid support to those experiencing domestic abuse.

Some will argue this is what matters. It’s the delivery of the product, processes or programme that creates potentially life-changing impact where the problem meets the people affected by it. That this is how we get closest to the very people we aim to serve and create most impact. In my organisation’s case it means we can make claims that we have helped X million people in disaster relief, for example. And that’s vital work, without a doubt. The primary consideration is whether you successfully solved the problem or realised the idea or met the need. The funder’s primary concern is then ‘did the solution work and how can we scale it?’ But as we have seen in some of my other articles, in a complex setting this is not helpful logic. Scale becomes a flawed concept. Worse, it is destructive logic as it forces recipients to play a game they know they can’t win: they know that in a complex system they don’t have control over the outcomes yet are forced to evidence how they have achieved them. So we need to rethink what we really mean by scale in a complex system.

The first challenge to achieve scale in a complex system is to link our work – the processes, products or programmes we are delivering – to the aspects of the system we are trying to change. That’s where the gold lies. That’s where real scale can be achieved and we can have the biggest impact on most people way beyond the scale of an individual programme. Donella Meadows^⁠1 famously talked about leverage points^⁠2, those elements of a system which when addressed can result in outsized impacts. If we can find a leverage point that we are well placed to address through our programmes, perhaps by demonstrating that an alternative is better than the current way of doing things, we can scale that idea by its wider adoption by others in the system. This is how we create change beyond the scope of a single programme and scale it across the system. It’s why we need to keep our focus on the system we are trying to change as well as on the effective delivery of our programmes. The work of a single organisation can therefore have outsized impact across the system. As explored in recent articles, this requires the organisation to be operating effectively (scale 1), its programmes to be delivered effectively (scale 2), and its focus to be resolutely on those aspects of the system it intends to change (scale 3). Align all three and it stands a chance of fulfilling its systems change mission. From a high level perspective this is what a systems change organisation looks like.

The concept of scale therefore can have resonance within the context of changing systems. But in complexity it is used not in the economic nor in the tech-centred, Silicon Valley sense, but rather as an idea with two core concepts at its heart. First, that we can have an outsized impact in our work if, as summarised above, it is explicitly aimed at those parts of the system that we think we have a reasonable chance of changing. If we can address a core opportunity or leverage point, the impact of our work can scale across the system. The other concept is building a movement for change, a parallel effort where we seek to scale the number of people and organisations that broadly align with a common vision for a changed system. People can share and adopt learning and insights, spread innovations and new practice across the system and bring others into the orbit of the systems change work. The more the movement grows the greater the pressure for change it can create.

Investors or donors relying on traditional economic metrics are faced with some challenges with this notion of scale when investing in complex systems. The biggest challenge is that it can’t be predicted. We never know for sure what impact our intervention will have on a complex system. The other primary concern is timescale. Because we can’t know when an intervention may or may not create change, we can’t mandate it within the temporal confines of a funded programme. Rarely do we revisit the scene of a programme several years later to review its long-term systemic impact, and work to build a movement for change is generally slow, doesn’t follow a smooth path and offers no guarantees of results. The uncertainty over impact and timescales make value difficult to evidence. But then so much in today’s world is not valued within the economic models that frame it. It doesn’t mean, though, that this work is not valuable for those who stand to benefit. And while systems change is not an investable proposition for donors or funders wanting a return on their investment, in complexity it is how you can achieve change at scale and thereby benefit the greatest number of people.