Tom Chance Blog On replicating and scaling

There is an unhelpful tendency in the social/community sector to focus on a narrow number of highly marketable community projects and say - they've proven the concept, let's replicate them! To view replication at scale as a matter of sharing compelling case studies so that others can follow their example. But it rarely works like that, at least not at any scale, and especially not in domains like property development and housing where projects take at least 5 years and must contend with a system hostile to any kind of new entrant. (When we talk about scale, we rarely define what we mean. Do we want 100 similar projects? One in every city, town and village? 5% of the market share? The unspoken ambiguity lets us off the hook, permits us to celebrate small-scale success with challenge.) Often, these success stories have been enabled by specific local factors - the...