"Does It Scale?"

Image via Unsplash.

Spend any time with public policy nerds talking about ideas to make the world better, and someone will ask the question: "Yeah, but does it scale?" 

As a public policy nerd who uses that language a lot myself, I think it’s worth asking what we mean.

The underlying intent of the question is noble. Asking, "Does it scale?" is a recognition that there are urgent problems to solve, and each one of us has precious few years on Earth in which to make our contribution. So we ask, "How many lives can I touch? How much good can I do?" Or a more clinical, "What's the rate of return on investment" of time, money, intellectual, and emotional energy?

Not everyone operates this way, of course. Many people are content to devote their living years to things that will only ever change the lives of a few, but will shape those lives profoundly. For most of us, this isn't a bad way to spend your energies. On an emotional level, it's almost certainly the most rewarding. Think about good parenting: because it's a nearly all-consuming, lifelong relationship, it inherently cannot "scale." You do your utmost to give the best preparation for life that you can to one or more humans, and you can die knowing you gave someone everything, even if the rest of the world will forget you. 

But what if you had the opportunity to help a thousand people be better parents? Or ten million?

There's a subset of people who are called to fix something out there in the world. Who see a problem and then can't stop seeing it. It tugs at their idle moments and aimless thoughts. For that person, the difference between efforts that scale and those that don't is everything.

The “scale” question prompts us to recognize and then look beyond responses to problems that inherently will never do more than tinker around the edges of the problem. Things like community gardens as a path to local food self-sufficiency (they're great, but they're not one), better lightbulbs as a way to fight climate change (ditto), employer-sponsored bus passes to counter traffic congestion, or requiring developers to build a few affordable units per project as a remedy to sky-high housing costs.

Scalable impact is something we ponder deeply and frequently at Strong Towns. We're an organization with a staff of 10 and a ludicrously ambitious stated goal of changing the North American development pattern. The only way to credibly approach such a goal is to focus on activities that we believe will have a profound multiplier effect. This in a nutshell is why we produce content for a mass audience, instead of consulting or writing white papers. We want our work to scale.

And yet, there's an important wrinkle in understanding what "scale" ought to mean.

Scale the Impact, Not the Enterprise

I asked recently, in a couple public forums, "How do we get far more small-scale developers and builders working in our cities—ten or a hundred times more, enough to answer the naysayers who claim that incremental development doesn't scale?" (This is the subject of an ongoing research project I'm undertaking to better answer that question—look for it later this year.)

Learn More about incremental development over at the Action Lab!

What I meant was, "How do we make it so our cities are built by many hands?" instead of being shaped by relatively few. Think of that distinctive neighborhood street you love in your city that's fine grained, always lively with people and just bursting with local character—how do we get it so there are 10 times as many of those places, each with as much heart?

It was clear to me from some of the responses I got that the question was heard differently. Some respondents thought I meant, "How do we industrialize, standardize, and streamline the building of small buildings on small infill lots, so that it can be financed and executed efficiently?" How do we make it cost-competitive with Wall Street-backed spreadsheet development, and deliver comparable returns?

After all, this is what "scale" often means in our society and economy. Jimmy's Pizza doesn't scale. Pizza Hut scales. Target scales.

At the level of the individual enterprise (or program, initiative, or policy), scale is problematic. Generations of insightful thinkers such as E.F. Schumacher (Small is Beautiful) and Nassim Taleb (Antifragile) have observed as much. Scaling an effort by centralizing power and control makes communities less resilient, because it creates powerful single points of failure. Once you're dependent on Amazon's supply chain to get half of everything you buy, you're at the mercy of Amazon's decisions. Once the FHA decides it will only insure a certain kind of mortgage, a whole continent unsurprisingly fills up with that kind of house.

"The whole point of incremental development is that it doesn't scale," multiple people have told me, and they're right in the sense they're using the word. These projects are unique, idiosyncratic, and inspired by deep local knowledge. That's where the value added is. The person who builds a fourplex with room for a barber shop on the ground floor isn't getting loan rates competitive with what big developers get; they're likely paying more for skilled labor and materials; and any delays or regulatory hassles take a proportionately bigger cut of their budget to resolve. Big developers enjoy economies of scale; small developers succeed by knowing their community intimately and thus unlocking value in ways that are illegible to a larger, more streamlined enterprise.

If getting buildings built isn't what you're working toward, you can apply the same principle to anything about city making. The whole point of good community engagement is that it doesn't scale, because it doesn't reduce people to data points. The whole point of good street design is that it doesn't come from a manual but from the needs of the people who will use the street.

Those of us who want to create strong towns should not be looking for a program or a policy hack that will "scale." Not in the sense that we can plop the template down in city after city.

Image via Unsplash.

The Rainforest Analogy

But cookie-cutter replicability is not the only way to think about scale. At least, it's not the only way to think about the impact of your work scaling. If it were, we should all go home, quit trying to change the world, quit thinking about the state of the world, and only focus on our neighborhood, our street, or our household. Why aim for "scale"?

Again: because the size of the world's problems nags at some of us in a way that won't let go.

An analogy we often use at Strong Towns is that of an old-growth forest versus monocrop agriculture. The cornfield exhibits one version of "scale." It is a scientifically calibrated environment with predictable inputs and outputs. It is amenable to a standardized supply chain, from harvesting to storage and transportation; it facilitates a secondary futures market in the commodity (corn) itself.

But the rainforest "scales" in a different way: it is a staggeringly productive environment. Tropical forests are the most biodiverse places on Earth by an almost incomprehensible margin: according to Rhett A. Butler in Mongabay, "Whereas temperate forests are often dominated by a half dozen tree species or fewer that make up 90 percent of the trees in the forest, a tropical rainforest may have more than 480 tree species in a single hectare (2.5 acres). A single bush in the Amazon may have more species of ants than the entire British Isles."

These places are not only high in biodiversity, they are also high in biomass. There is usually a positive relationship, in fact, between species diversity and biomass: places with more kinds of life are also more teeming with life.

The analogy to this in human cities is apparent, and helps us understand why diversity—or at least distributed decision-making—matters. Twenty small owners occupying a city block will maximize the beauty and productivity of every square foot of that block, because each owner has the incentive to do so. One large business occupying that same block is likely to waste space and miss opportunities, leave corners unadorned or unloved or underused: the 30,000-foot view of a larger controlling entity fails to maximize delight per acre.

When you think about it this way, the system that can achieve scale—in the sense of an abundance and variety of everything that makes cities valuable to us humans—is not one that has an orderly guiding hand. It’s one that has a million contributing hands. Decentralized placemaking is precisely the thing that does scale.

As an individual trying to contribute to such a system, though, how do you think about the impact of your own efforts? The return on your time and thought and passion?

I think the answer is that we don't give up on the dream of a large impact, but we do give up on the idea of orchestrating that impact from start to finish, of assembling the resources and expertise under our purview to “solve” the problem. To fix this world, we need to create things that grow beyond our imagining or our control by inspiring copycat efforts and countless variations.

Instead of "Does it scale?" maybe ask yourself this in deciding whether an effort is worth contributing your talents to:

"Does it inspire?"

---

---