Scalability as Sustainability

People view sustainable development from different angles and through different lenses. While I was in the Peace Corps, the prevailing wisdom held that sustainable development required the commitment of host country nationals to the particular development projects after the volunteer had left the country. While this is easier said than done, it doesn't necessarily say anything very profound. Of course, development requires commitment from the beneficiaries of that development.

While I was fighting to have Peace Corps Costa Rica expand or clarify its definition of sustainable development, I came across this Foreign Affairs article (sorry, the full text isn't available for free online) that discusses the origins of sustainable development. According to the article, the notion of sustainable development arose in the 1980s, thanks to an academic report called "Our Common Future," put together by the World Commission on Environment and Development. The report claimed that "boosting the economy, protecting natural resources, and ensuring social justice are not conflicting but interwoven and complementary goals." This line of thought paved the way for what many now know as Triple-Bottom-Line Sustainability.

Oddly enough, the Peace Corps (Costa Rica) definition of sustainable development lacked the environmental slant that characterizes much of the sustainability movement. Essentially, the Peace Corps' perspective focuses on the people who would sustain the operations of a project, whereas the triple-bottom-line perspective focuses on the social and environmental factors that would eventually prevent the continuation of a project's operations.

While both of these viewpoints are valid and entirely necessary, they often fail to highlight an important part of sustainability that can facilitate truly powerful ideas: scalability. An idea is much more impactful if it can serve as an example for other communities across the globe to emulate. Even further, I posit that scalability can be evidence that an idea is sustainable, at least in the more traditional sense of the word.

In the business world, the most promising business endeavors are the ones that exist independently of any one person's unique expertise. If a company has to rely on the creativity or management expertise of a single person, the continuation of that company's operations is at great risk. Perhaps more importantly, the growth and profitability of a business may be stifled by the inability of its model to scale to other regions when it is managed by different people in different cultural contexts.

The development world is similar in a lot of ways. Development projects that involve local people with unique talents may be quite advantageous in the short term, but what happens when the leaders move away, move on to something different, or retire altogether? One way to assess these risks is to ask yourself if a project could be scaled to include the neighboring community, the rest of the country, or the rest of the world. If this is the case, then the project probably has good prospects for sustainability. However, if the project doesn't pass this test, it probably will not be sustainable in the long term, or even in the short term in a disparate group of places.

I don't mean to belittle grassroots development that relies on talented, dedicated people at the local level who work for local benefit. In fact, I believe this to be the only form of develop that truly works. Ideas must first be tested for feasibility at the ground level. However, it would be quite wasteful for outside development workers to ignore the impact created by scalable ideas, models that can be adapted to a greater number of communities. In my experience, this broader perspective is often lost on grassroots development workers who are fighting tooth-and-nail to achieve objectives at the local level.

So, ideas pass important sustainability tests if they are 1) not unduly restricted to a small group of leaders and 2) scalable to other environments, thus proving their validity in a very powerful way. With a slight shift of perspective, we can ask ourselves important questions of sustainability and scalability to make a greater impact in our organizations and communities. These questions include--but are by no means limited to--the following:

What if Charlie gets hit by a bus tomorrow? What would happen then?

Would this new product sell in another country? If not, are there powerful attributes we must keep, or others we must do away with to adapt the product to a new environment. (See Four Actions Framework.)

What are some processes we can put in place today that could make this project work outside the confines of our own unique situation?

If we forget about scalability in our quest for sustainability, we can miss out on great opportunities to make small ideas big.