If You Want to Make Something Worse, Scale It!

Positive Deviants Fellowship #4

Just kidding!

But not entirely.

Over the past three weeks, I’ve explored complexity leadership capabilities, positive deviance and compound vision. To round out this mini-series, I thought I’d close with……

Scale!

The skin of a dragon, the notes on a piano, the lime deposits in your kettle, the device that lies about your weight…how can five letters mean so many different things?

The Positive Deviants Fellowship 2025 is accepting applications and nominations and we’re looking for people whose work is poised to make a tangible impact at scale around issues of critical concern.

What does that mean?

Tangible impact? Are you making a difference, or just making a noise? It’s a bracing question but it comes with a challenge. If you don’t assess your impact reliably, how do you know if you’re actually doing something worthwhile? However, when we prioritize hard data - for all kinds of excellent reasons - our attention is drawn to that which can be most easily measured. Numbers of clients served. Graduation rates. GDP. KPI’s. But it can be hard – or even impossible - to quantify critical elements of complex systems. It’s easy to say what the weather was like yesterday. Much harder to describe the non-linear dynamics of the climate.

The deeper the level of systems intervention, the harder it is to measure impact in the short term. And there will always be pressure to get immediate results and call it ‘systems change!’

Scale? Scale usually refers to the dimensional characteristics of a system - its size, extent, or level of organization. Every system exhibits distinct characteristics at different spatial, temporal or hierarchical scales. And in complex systems, scale is much more than just a dimension. It's also a critical attribute that fundamentally shapes a system’s behavior, interactions, and emergent properties.

Scaling often describes the ability of a given system – whether it’s a business, a social movement, a biological organism or a technology platform - to grow efficiently without losing its functionality or core identity. Systems thinkers Michele-Lee Moore and Darcy Riddell describe three distinct scaling patterns that offer important differentiation for leaders and innovators:

- Scaling Up: changing policy or laws to shift the broader institutional ‘rules of the game’

- Scaling Out: replicating an innovation in different contexts to reach more people

- Scaling Deep: influencing deeper beliefs, meaning-making and value systems.

When we’re trying to assess the potential for impact at scale, we’re always asking what kind of scale? We’re always interested in people’s theories of change. But we’re particularly interested in how they’re thinking and holding questions about scale.

Trigger warning – this paragraph contains math! Most systems exhibit power laws; they follow predictable – and quite simple –mathematical patterns as they increase in scale. A change in one thing – such as the population of a city or the energy released by an earthquake - leads to a non-linear exponential change in a second - the number of innovation patents filed in that city or the destructive impact of the quake. The ratio of change in the second is expressed as a power of the first. Metcalfe’s Law famously attempted to quantify the value of a telecommunications network as a ratio of its constituent units. While they are blunt instruments for representing the disproportionate impact of individual agents in a social field, such power laws are surprisingly consistent and help us understand the underlying patterns of phenomena as varied as clouds, coastlines, evolutionary biology, internet traffic, forest fires, wealth disparity, urban development, stock prices, the productivity of businesses and the generative value of social fields or communications networks.

And the takeaway is?

For those of us interested in complex systems, power laws remind us that as a system grows or changes scale, its properties don't change proportionally but can transform qualitatively. This phenomenon leads to emergence - where system-level properties arise unexpectedly from interactions at lower scales.

An example that you’re watching in real time is the development of AI. By exponentially increasing model size, parameters, and training data (along with massive increases in investment capital, energy use, parallel processing power and data storage) AI models have developed unprecedented linguistic capabilities. More really does seem to be more – the More’s More Law! - for these hungry Large Language Models; scaling has resulted in dramatic improvements and emergent abilities to understand context, generate coherent text, and perform complex language tasks that smaller models could not.

Understanding scale can be one of the keys that unlocks systems transformation.

Anyone working with a systems perspective will find themselves oscillating between the part and the whole. The individual and the collective. The hyper-local and the global. The immediate and the inter-generational. One way we navigate the paradoxical terrain created by this tension are the questions we habitually ask ourselves. The kind of questions that travel with us, orienting our attention and keeping us on our toes as we move towards an ever-shifting horizon. One such question that travels with me was offered by a wise mentor some years ago. Are you crystal clear about whom or what your work is in service to? The one whose life must actually improve in some real way - otherwise your work will have been a failure?

Gulp! It’s not the only thing to ask but it has been a powerful way to keep things real.

On the other end of the spectrum is a question posed by a recent Fellow – which originated with the Unreasonable Group. Does this person’s work hold the potential to positively impact at least a million people in the next five years? It’s obviously an arbitrary number but it packs its own punch. What scale are you working at?

At Wolf Willow we’re always curious about the transformative potential of an idea, initiative or innovation. We’re equally curious about its potential for diffusion and connectivity across existing systems and institutions. And perhaps most importantly, the capacity of an individual or group to work between systems and across scales. One of the factors we consider in the Positive Deviants assessment process is some version of could that capacity be meaningfully developed as a result of this person’s participation in the Fellowship? Our curiosity is shaped by several observations:

Certain ideas seem to travel together. In his 1904 classic The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, sociologist Max Weber coined the term elective affinity to describe the way different ideological, cultural, or institutional systems seem to co-evolve. It offers a valuable meta-systemic lens that helps us join the dots. By understanding the distinct eco-cultural dynamics of rice farming and wheat farming cultures we can learn more about the divergent education systems that evolved alongside them. The ways that romanticism and nationalism fuel one another. The emergence of anarcho-libertarianism and hyper-individualism alongside blockchain and tech start-up culture.

What existing social, technological or philosophical architecture is your idea travelling with?

Going viral is not scaling. Virality is made possible – in part - by the edge/node ratio scaling that has already happened in a network. Many social movements in the modern era – such as the Arab Spring democracy protestors - experience sudden exponential growth fuelled by viral networking. But they struggle to scale viable institutional systems that can match the scale of interest in and/or opposition to their movement. Virality is a mixed blessing for movements trying to scale and have a long-term impact. It tends to trigger the immune system of larger or adjacent systems – and all too often results in precisely the opposite outcomes of those originally sought.

Bigger is not necessarily better! History is littered with bad ideas that were well-executed at scale. Sometimes things get worse as they scale or find new niche applications. We can all think of technical innovations that appeared to solve one problem but created massive new ones as they were widely adopted - leaded gasoline, CFC’s, synthetic opioids. Many social innovators grow despondent watching their initiatives lose transformative momentum – or even doing unexpected harm – as they scale and becoming more widely adopted across mainstream institutions.

Often, as things scale, they reach certain thresholds and tipping points that result in some kind of inverse scale/quality ratio. The scaling itself leads to new, unforeseen consequences and systems properties. Examples would include:

- Infinite demand meets finite limits. The self-reinforcing feedback loop that can ruin over-popular restaurants and Instagrammble tourist destinations. As Yogi Berra quipped, “nobody goes there anymore – it’s too crowded!”

- Massification. Every marketer knows that increased demand for a luxury brand can lead to mass production, aggressive expansion, price discounting, overexposure and brand dilution. But the same thing often happens for transformative ideas, cultural traditions or wise practices when they are commodified and widely marketed or evangelised. You start out with sacred traditions that require decades of disciplined training from their entry level teachers and you end up with instant shamans and mindfulness influencers selling branded water bottles and spa wear.

- Capacity gaps: the ability to offer more of a particular product or service becomes impossible without compromising quality. The very thing that made a particular service, business or consultancy so good is lost as they expand. Sometimes what made them great was a unique individual and this can lead to what social innovators call charisma traps. An innovation is unable to scale past the capacity of a key individual or founder. “We wish we could just clone X!”

- Tragedy of the commons: shared resources (e.g. Newfoundland’s cod fishery) are over-exploited by parties seeking to extract maximum individual gain leading to the depletion or collapse of the shared resource. The rules of the system end up rewarding the very scaling behaviour that leads to its own demise. The way fish stocks collapse and civilizations end.

Conversely, the widespread adoption of highly localized patterns of interaction can lead to surprising and beneficial new systems properties. Because scaling is not just about doing more. It’s about doing enough of the right thing to catalyze the right kind of tipping point. Small can be not only beautiful but very powerful.

The Fellowship, above all, is about finding and cultivating those catalytic interventions.

We’re looking for people who are building – or supporting the emergence of - living models of successful adaptation or innovation. Who want to look at the familiar with fresh eyes. Who are deeply serious about building their capability for leadership and influence. Who are committed to making a tangible impact at scale and the evolutionary journey that might demand of them.

If that sounds like you, or someone you know, we’d love to hear from you!