Scale is the most confusing word in social change

Not long ago I was sitting in the courtyard of a pleasant city cafe in inner Sydney when a colleague from a big Australian NGO leaned over and said in a hushed but determined tone, that we needed to scale. I nodded. But looking back I wish I had brought more curiosity to the conversation. I could have asked, what did she mean by scale? Did she want more people, more change, action in more places? Did it have to be fast? Did she mean something else?

The question of how we might scale social change is a genuine mystery but it is also faddishly desired. In order to imagine how we might ‘scale’ social change we need to first take back the term ‘scale’ from the corporate startups who made it famous.

Origins

The word scale comes from the Latin word ‘scala’ meaning ladder or staircase. Scale initially referred to climbing, where something — some idea or practice — moved from a ‘lower place’ to some grander space. Geographers were the first to embrace the term. Scale was used to show how a map represented an area in ways that was true to real life. Think of a map made using a ratio of 1:100km; the map scales to represent real life, without stretching or distorting.

Bless the modern business pundits who, in the early 2000s, took the concept of scale and dare I say, scaled it. In…