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Scaling Out, Scaling Up, Scaling Deep:!
Advancing Systemic Social Innovation and!the
Learning Processes to Support it!
Prepared for the J.W. McConnell Family Foundation and Tamarack Institute!!
by Darcy Riddell and Michele-Lee Moore (October 2015)
[ 2 ]
Scaling Out, Scaling Up, and Scaling Deep!
by Darcy Riddell and Michele-Lee Moore
Acknowledgements: We would like to thank the Advisory Committee members on this project for
their insights and support: Stephen Huddart, Al Etmanski, Tim Draimin, Tim Brodhead, Paul Born,
and Dana Vocisano. We also acknowledge Vickie Cammack’s contribution through her ongoing role
in Applied Dissemination and co-leadership of the Sustaining Social Innovation project. Finally,
recognizing that we all stand on the shoulders of giants, we would also like to appreciate the huge
influence of Katharine Pearson over this body of thinking and practice. Numerous participants in this
study expressed their gratitude for Katharine’s work during her time at the McConnell Foundation
and for her leadership and support throughout the Applied Dissemination initiative.
Executive Summary:
How can brilliant but isolated experiments aimed at a solving the most pressing and complex social
and ecological problems become more widely adopted and lead to transformative impact? Leaders
of social change and innovation often struggle to expand their impact on social systems, and funders
of such change are increasingly concerned with the scale and positive impact of their investments. In
1998, the Montreal-based J.W. McConnell Family Foundation pursued a deliberate granting strategy
known as Applied Dissemination to reframe approaches to replicating successful projects. A few
years later, the Foundation began convening its grantees receiving funding from the Applied
Dissemination (AD) program to accelerate the impacts of their initiatives, develop a stronger
understanding of the complex systems in which they worked, and to collectively begin to address
some of Canada’s most intractable social problems. The AD learning group focused on peer-based
learning and application, in an environment that created trust and respect among participants. The
AD learning group was successful not only in improving individual and organizational efforts to
accelerate and scale impact, but also in catalyzing a field of practice in Canada that focused on
generating new social innovations, and scaling up and deepening the impact of those innovative
initiatives. More than a decade later, the experience contains valuable lessons about effective
scaling strategies, and about how to design applied learning approaches to support social
innovators.
Part one of this report distills important lessons from a decade of practice in accelerating impact and
scaling social innovations, including the strategies used to achieve success. Part two summarizes
insights from this cohort of social innovators about the design elements involved in the applied, peer-
based learning process and how that ultimately built their personal and organizational capacity. This
successful initiative was not without challenges though, and these are also detailed in the report.
Part One: Strategies for Scaling up, out and deep
Research in social innovation and social enterprise has focused on the strategies required to move
ideas from one context to a larger scale (Bradach, 2010, Evans & Clarke, 2011, McPhedran et al.,
2011, Mulgan et al., 2008). From a social innovation perspective, large-scale change will necessarily
involve changes to rules, resource flows, cultural beliefs and relationships in a social system at
multiple spatial or institutional scales. However, in social entrepreneurship and social enterprise
studies, the emphasis on “scaling for impact” often reflects a product and consumer orientation,
synonymous with diffusion or replication. However, scaling social innovations to effect larger-scale
change involves a more complex and diverse process than simply ‘diffusing’ or spreading a product
or model. It is important to learn about the process of how social systems and institutions can be
deliberately impacted through the work of organizations, foundations, and other agents of change.
[ 3 ]
Scaling Out, Scaling Up, and Scaling Deep!
by Darcy Riddell and Michele-Lee Moore
A Typology of Routes to Systemic Impact:
Scaling out, Scaling up and Scaling deep
This report builds a typology of three approaches to scaling which underscores the complexities and
complementary nature of the strategies involved in advancing large systems change, opening up
new avenues for non-profit leaders to consider, and illuminating the role of funders and conveners in
amplifying the potential impacts of social change initiatives. Our research identified five cross-cutting
scaling strategies, and five strategies associated specifically with the three types of scaling. “Scaling
out” was the approach that McConnell Foundation staff and the AD learning group focused on
originally, emphasizing replication of successful innovations in different communities, with the hopes
of spreading those same results to more people. However, the majority of participants found that
reproducing an initiative might never address deeper systems holding social problems in place. For
many initiatives, the route to greater impact lay in changing institutions, policy and law - “scaling up”
to change the “rules of the game”. Strategies for “scaling deep” related to the notion that durable
change has been achieved only when people’s hearts and minds, their values and cultural practices,
and the quality of relationships they have, are transformed (see Figure 1).
Figure 1. Scaling out, scaling up and scaling deep for social innovation
1.2 The
Why
and
What
of Scaling: Reframing Purpose Using Systems Thinking
In each of the organizations involved in the Applied Dissemination learning group, an initiative had
begun at a community level. As organizations and their partners advanced scaling strategies, they
found the need to clarify or reframe their purpose, since scaling activities often differed from the
organization’s typical or previous activities. This occurred in two major ways, which we identify as
cross-cutting strategies: 1) by making scale and impact a conscious choice, and 2) by analyzing root
Scale!Up:!!
"Impac'ng*laws*and*
policy"*
Changing!ins)tu)ons!at!the!
level!of!policy,!rules!and!
laws!
Scale!Out:!!
"Impac'ng*greater*
numbers"*
Replica)on!and!
dissemina)on,!
increasing!number!of!
people!or!communi)es!
impacted!
!!
!
Scale!Deep:!!
"Impac'ng*cultural*
roots"*
Changing!rela)onships,!
cultural!values!and!
beliefs,!"hearts!and!
minds"!
[ 4 ]
Scaling Out, Scaling Up, and Scaling Deep!
by Darcy Riddell and Michele-Lee Moore
causes using systems thinking, and clarifying the purpose of their innovation. Once they made
scaling a deliberate choice, participants employed many strategies to spread their social innovations
and challenge the systemic problems at the root of their issues. Their chosen strategy depended on
the founding conditions of their organization, the context surrounding their issue, the resources and
support they could access, choices they made about who to partner with and how to achieve impact,
and the windows of opportunity - political, cultural and social - that emerged.
1.3 The How of Scaling: Strategies for Scaling Out, Up and Deep
Once they made scaling a deliberate choice, participants employed many strategies to spread their
social innovations and challenge the systemic problems at the root of their issues. Their chosen
strategy depended on the founding conditions of their organization, the context surrounding their
issue, the resources and support they could access, choices they made about who to partner with
and how to achieve impact, and the windows of opportunity - political, cultural and social - that
emerged. The core scaling strategies associated with scaling out, scaling up and scaling deep are
summarized in Table 1, along with three additional cross-cutting strategies employed by
organizations involved in the AD learning group.
Table 1. Types of “scaling” and their main strategies
Description
Main Strategies
Scaling Out:
Impacting greater numbers. Based on
the recognition that many good ideas
or initiatives never spread or achieve
widespread impact.
Deliberate replication:
Replicating or spreading programs
geographically and to greater
numbers
Spreading principles:
Disseminate principles, with
adaptation to new contexts via co-
generation of knowledge
Scaling Up:
Impacting law and policy. Based on the
recognition that the roots of social
problems transcend particular places,
and innovative approaches must be
codified in law, policy and institutions.
Policy or legal change efforts:
New policy development,
partnering, advocacy to advance
legal change and redirect
institutional resources.
Scaling
Deep:
Impacting cultural roots. Based on the
recognition that culture plays a
powerful role in shifting problem-
domains, and change must be deeply
rooted in people, relationships,
communities and cultures.
Spreading big cultural ideas and
using stories to shift norms and
beliefs
Investing in transformative
learning and communities of
practice
Cross-
cutting
strategies
for scaling:
Cross-cutting strategies were those
approaches all participants reported
using to scale their initiatives, and were
not specifically associated with scaling
out, up, or deep.
Making scale a conscious
choice
Analyzing root causes and
clarifying purpose
Building networks and
partnerships
Seeking new resources
Commitment to evaluation
Key challenges practitioners faced in scaling included the leadership stresses involved in leading
change as well as the organizational dynamics that arose when the amount of focus and cultural
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Scaling Out, Scaling Up, and Scaling Deep!
by Darcy Riddell and Michele-Lee Moore
shift required to scale an initiative caused disconnects and misunderstanding in the founding
organization.
What becomes clear is an evolution in the way practitioners are thinking about, and attempting to
achieve, scale. Most initiatives blended different types and strategies for scaling, emphasizing
different types of scale at different phases of the process in order to achieve greater impact on the
social issues of deepest concern to them. However, two patterns dominated for the practitioners
involved in this study: i) they moved from scaling out to scaling up, or ii) they moved from scaling out
to scaling deep.
Part Two: Applied Learning to Accelerate Impact
Part two of the report describes the design, content and processes that were part of the Applied
Dissemination (AD) learning initiative, as well as the personal and organizational value practitioners
gained and some of the challenges they faced during the learning process. Specific aspects of the
AD learning process and design were identified as critical for any peer-learning processes, including:
a) participant selection, b) the conditions created by the convenors c) the culture and environment
the learning group created and nurtured together, and d) the timely introduction of content and
frameworks to support learning.
Participant selection for the AD learning group focused on drawing together a number of people
from different backgrounds that worked on diverse social and environmental challenges. These
practitioners had all initiated promising changes in their communities or fields, and faced similar
leadership challenges in pioneering new approaches and desiring to increase their scale and impact.
This shared context enabled mutual support towards big visions of change. But the growth in
understanding about shared context was also supported by the conditions created by the
convenors. Importantly, the McConnell Foundation staff recognized the wisdom that the
practitioners brought into the learning process and used experiential, peer-based and participatory
approaches. Likewise, McConnell Foundation staff also joined the learning journey, and the
Foundation embraced and modeled many of the key concepts. Over time, a deeply trusting and
respectful peer learning culture and environment was created and nurtured together. The trust,
respect, and safety associated with the AD learning group was attributed to both the participants’
common experience but also to the design elements of the learning sessions.
The AD learning group was enriched by the timely introduction of content and frameworks to
support learning about scale and impact that were shared by various experts, whose
contributions were applied to real-life organizational challenges. Invited experts brought credible
knowledge and frameworks that were relevant to practitioners, influencing a different quality of
practice, and supporting root analysis of problems. The concepts and analysis helped participants to
“find vocabularies for their experience”. Specific knowledge, frameworks and methods were
recognized by participants as crucial in their learning about innovation, scaling and accelerating
impact, including:
• The adaptive cycle and theory of resilience;
• Complexity and systems thinking;
• Development evaluation;
• Using collaborative and participatory approaches for every phase of innovation;
• Case study analysis; and
• Peer input processes.
Combining thoughtful design, a constructive and emotionally supportive learning environment, and
expert and peer-driven content led to significant personal and organizational impacts. Benefits
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Scaling Out, Scaling Up, and Scaling Deep!
by Darcy Riddell and Michele-Lee Moore
included participants trying approaches in their problem area that had not been done before in
Canada, and sometimes in the world, and giving the organizations a new sense of direction and
ambition. Participants began to see themselves as resources for one another. Furthermore, a
number of participants chose to use the principles of experiential group learning that they had
experienced in the AD learning group within their own organization or networks, coming to view
collaborative learning as an essential part of the entire social innovation process. For groups
whose mission required the dissemination of knowledge and new models of collaboration, the
convening methods, frameworks, and peer-learning processes demonstrated in the AD community
of practice became central to their own engagement and scaling work.
For those designing peer-based learning groups in the future, the challenges arising from the AD
learning group can also provide useful insights. Some participants acknowledged that a funder
bringing grantees together increased the burden of responsibility to grow and succeed. Group
transition was also a challenge both when participant organizations experienced staff turnover, and
later when the McConnell Foundation faced grantee pressures to expand the group. The bonds of
trust and the intensity of the learning community depended on maintaining an intimate group, which
was in tension with the desire to extend its positive impact to greater numbers. This delicate balance
is an important element in group learning process design.
Conclusion:
We conclude with several observations. First, the practice of scaling in Canada has evolved from
earlier, simpler conceptions to a much more nuanced understanding. We have identified three types
of scaling associated with five associated strategies, as well as five cross-cutting strategies that
supported change leaders to expand the impact of their social solutions. These practitioners not only
sought to disseminate their innovations over wider geographic areas or to greater numbers, but
aimed also at systemic impacts - changes to rules, resource flows, cultural beliefs and relationships
in a social system at multiple spatial or institutional scales. The experience of Canadian practitioners
can provide an orienting map for the complex and often isolating journey of social innovation,
suggesting that multiple approaches to scaling may be needed to achieve systemic impacts.
Second, a critical part of the scaling process involved learning. Many participants also still draw on
frameworks introduced, and rely on reference material they collected from the sessions when
thinking through difficult decisions or when training new staff. By convening the AD learning group,
the McConnell Foundation supported interconnectedness among practitioners, shifted its own
practice and also created the conditions for emergence, whereby new ideas and approaches could
be fostered. Many participants remain committed to the relationships developed during the AD
learning group, and continue to serve as a resource and support system for each other and
emerging leaders.
Third, implementing a peer-based, experiential learning forum was recognized by all who
participated as extremely valuable. However, this was a resource-intensive exercise. It is difficult to
achieve such impact without spending the time, energy, and financial resources to bring people
together in thoughtful and thought-provoking ways. While this resource-intensiveness raises
questions about the “scalability” of the impact of such learning processes, the experiences of a
number of participants who have gone on to embed peer-based learning in their own organizations
and networks demonstrates that the model can be scaled. Social technologies and advances in
online learning platforms are making scaling of peer networks and dissemination of knowledge much
more available, and while these do not replace face-to-face learning, they can complement and
support learning cohorts in ever-expanding ways. Much of the early learning material used in Applied
Dissemination has been systematized through the SiG Knowledge Hub, www.sigknowledgehub.ca,
as well as on Innoweave.ca, the Foundation’s learning platform.
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Scaling Out, Scaling Up, and Scaling Deep!
by Darcy Riddell and Michele-Lee Moore
Finally, although the journey of social innovation is never complete, this report ends on a note of
celebration for successes and for new beginnings. It is clear that applied learning did help to
accelerate the impacts of several socially innovative initiatives across Canada. Now, these same
practitioners, along with new generations of change agents, are considering “what next” and
continuing to push the boundaries of social change practice.
[ 8 ]
Scaling Out, Scaling Up, and Scaling Deep!
by Darcy Riddell and Michele-Lee Moore
Scaling Out, Scaling Up, Scaling Deep:
Advancing systemic social innovation and the learning process to support it
Introduction:
How can brilliant, but isolated experiments aimed at a solving the most pressing and complex social
and ecological problems become more widely adopted and lead to transformative impact? Leaders
of social change and innovation often struggle to expand their impact on systems, and funders of
such change are increasingly concerned with the scale and positive impact of their investments. As
Bradach and Grindle (2014, p. 7) state, the catchphrase “scaling what works” has become “a rallying
cry to direct more funding to interventions that actually get results”. But questions remain about how
funders and social change leaders can work together to have an impact across scales and what
“scale” or “scaling” actually involves.
We define social innovation as any initiative, product, program, platform or design that challenges,
and over time changes, the defining routines, resource and authority flows, or beliefs of the social
system in which the innovation occurs (Westley & Antadze, 2010). We find that process of scaling
social innovations to achieve systemic impacts involves three different types of scaling - scaling out,
scaling up, and scaling deep – and systemic change is likely to require a combination of these types.
Although systems change processes in any complex problem domain will be emergent, we found
that certain strategies are associated with each type of scaling process. This report is based on
experiences from social innovation experiments conducted by charitable organizations and funded
by the J.W. McConnell Family Foundation, over more than a decade in Canada.
In 1998, the Montreal-based J.W. McConnell Family Foundation began pursuing a deliberate
strategy for moving beyond discrete project-based funding, in order to enable broader impact by
their grantees. The strategy was called Applied Dissemination and supported social innovators in
disseminating new programs, processes, skills or knowledge in their work with communities and
organizations, and to apply or adapt innovations in different settings (Pearson, 2006). This work
demanded that both the Foundation and their grantees work together as they became intentional in
their attempts to shift broader social structures, cultures and institutions. As one part of the Applied
Dissemination (AD) strategy, the McConnell Foundation hosted a learning community (or community
of practice), convening diverse grantees to learn from one another, to integrate concepts of systems
change into their practice, and to accelerate the impacts of funded innovations.
This study was undertaken to capture the lessons learned from participants in the AD learning
community. The findings have been divided into two main categories. Part One1 reveals insights into
the evolution of practitioners’ thinking about scaling innovation and accelerating impact over time,
and distinguishes the three types of scaling used by non-profit leaders, along with the specific
strategies connected to each, and five additional cross-cutting strategies. These results will be
interesting to foundations and organizations considering how to achieve broader and more durable
impact with their initiatives. Part Two focuses on the design and content of the community of
practice, and its impact on participants. These latter results may be of interest to foundations and
philanthropic organizations seeking to increase the impact of grantees or partners by convening peer
learning networks, or to those involved in designing and supporting communities of practice related
to systems change and scaling.
History of Social Innovation Funding
1 Part One contains previously published material from Moore, Michele-Lee, Darcy Riddell, and
Dana Vocisano. "Scaling Out, Scaling Up, Scaling Deep: Strategies of Non-profits in Advancing
Systemic Social Innovation." Journal of Corporate Citizenship 2015.58 (2015): 67-84.
[ 9 ]
Scaling Out, Scaling Up, and Scaling Deep!
by Darcy Riddell and Michele-Lee Moore
The Foundation’s work on scaling and social innovation dates back to the mid-1990s when it began
funding the replication of new and creative approaches. These tended to emerge at the community
or local level, and in an effort to facilitate their spread from one part of the country to another, the
Foundation began to invest in replication. The Foundation shifted its approach in 1998, and
developed the concept of “Applied Dissemination” (AD) and published its grant application guide
Should you sow what you know? The guide was informed by lessons from early replication grants,
and identified the characteristics thought necessary for spreading initiatives including: a deliberate
strategy, demonstrable demand, and the notion of ‘minimum specifications’ which preserved the
essence of an innovation while allowing for flexibility and adaptation to different circumstance.
The Foundation began convening grantees receiving funding from the AD program. They discovered
the sense of isolation and struggle these social innovators were experiencing and the source of
renewal they drew from each other and the sessions. The Foundation itself was also becoming an
instrument of change beyond grant-making, by creating an enabling condition or ‘safe space’.
Recognizing the impact of the sessions, the Foundation extended its original plan and committed
staff and resources to sustain it. From 2002 to 2007, the AD learning group evolved into a
community of practice and grew from 10 to 25 grantees that met annually. Building on experience
from the Applied Dissemination initiative, the McConnell Foundation also created the Sustaining
Social Innovation (SSI) initiative in partnership with PLAN Institute for Caring Citizenship and DuPont
Canada (http://tamarackcommunity.ca/ssi.html). This collaboration explored the conditions that led to
social innovations becoming transformative and enduring - in other words, understanding how to
create impact, durability and scale.
In 2006, the Foundation released Accelerating our Impact: Philanthropy, Innovation and Social
Change, which captured the learning from seven years of AD granting2. Social innovation thinking
was taking hold and many grantees were experiencing the limits of scaling out (replication and
dissemination) as a strategy to achieve domain-level change and were identifying the need to impact
wider systems and work at multiple levels of scale simultaneously in order to address complex
institutional contexts. The report also pointed the Foundation towards a new role that it could play in
supporting social innovation more broadly and how it could more systematically equip practitioners
with knowledge and tools.
What emerged was the Social Innovation Generation initiative (SiG), a partnership between the
Foundation, University of Waterloo, MaRS Discovery District, and PLAN Institute to collaborate in
creating a culture of continuous social innovation in Canada, to address entrenched social and
environmental challenges. Developing of a wider range of resources than what the Foundation could
provide alone, each partner undertook major initiatives to build capacity for Canadian social
innovation; these can be accessed through the SiG website and a knowledge hub
(www.sigknowledgehub.com) where leading research, ideas, and practices are shared to support
practitioners. Integrating these new approaches and practices with the learning from Accelerating
our Impact, the Foundation also launched a second generation of social innovation program granting
and learning activities. The Social Innovation Fund supports organizations that have proven or
promising early stage innovations and need additional support to create the capacity and conditions
to effectively sustain or scale them up. Innoweave helps organizations learn about, assess, and
implement new tools and approaches to generate greater impact and advance their mission more
2 Other related publications include: Westley and Antadze, 2010, Making a Difference: Strategies for
Scaling Social Innovation for Greater Impact; Moore, Westley, and Brodhead, 2012, Social Finance
Intermediaries and Social Innovation; Brodhead, 2011, In a world of unpredictable change, what
Canada needs most is resilience; and Westley, F., Antadze, N., Riddell, D. J., Robinson, K., &
Geobey, S. 2014, Five Configurations for Scaling Up Social Innovation: Case Examples of Nonprofit
Organizations From Canada.
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Scaling Out, Scaling Up, and Scaling Deep!
by Darcy Riddell and Michele-Lee Moore
quickly through on-line modules in-person workshops, and subsidized coaching
(www.innoweave.ca).
The intention is that what has been learned through the AD community of practice can be shared
through this report, as the McConnell Foundation and Social Innovation Generation partners
contemplate how to support learning for the next generation of social innovators and the wider field,
and the Tamarack Institute continues building its own capacity for scaling initiatives.
Case Study and Methods:
This case study involves a group of grantees in Canada, funded by the J.W. McConnell Family
Foundation who sought greater social impact through social innovation. Organizations were awarded
Applied Dissemination (AD) grants after an in-depth review. Selection criteria included showing: a
deliberate strategy, demonstrable demand (McConnell Foundation, 1998), and completed
evaluations that showed impact and distilled the ‘minimum specifications’ (Zimmerman, 1998) or
variable and fixed elements of an innovation.
From 2002 until 2007, the McConnell Foundation formally convened annual meetings with this AD
learning group, and many participants continued in peer-support roles beyond this period.
Organizations had diverse social change missions, governance and organizational structures and
strategies, but shared a focus on scaling their work. Participating organizations included Caledon
Institute of Social Policy, Child Development Institute, Tamarack, PLAN, L’Arche Canada, JUMP,
L’Abri en Ville, Community Health and Social Services Network, Roots of Empathy, Santropol
Roulant, Meal Exchange, and Engineers without Borders.
To conduct this review, 15 of the original AD group participants were invited in July 2013 to complete
a structured survey that used open-ended questions (e.g. What do you remember most from your
participation in the Applied Dissemination group?) that focused primarily on the experience of the
group, and how that experience shaped the dissemination or scaling of the socially innovative
initiatives with which the participants were involved. Following the survey, participants were invited to
participate in a small focus group session (max focus group participants = 4). Some participants
chose to only complete the survey (14), but 8 did both. In total, 3 focus group sessions were held
over the months of August-September 2013. Focus group participants were asked several
questions, including what they have learned about increasing the impact of their initiatives, how they
now think about “scale” and “scaling” in their work, what unintended consequences arose as they
attempted to scale, and what leadership challenges they faced as they undertook this work.
Appendix A contains names and organizational information of those interviewed. The entire data set
was then coded and analyzed. Preliminary findings informed a speech given by McConnell
Foundation CEO Stephen Huddart at the Communities Collaborating Institute event hosted by
Tamarack in Edmonton, Alberta in October, 2013.
[ 11 ]
Scaling Out, Scaling Up, and Scaling Deep!
by Darcy Riddell and Michele-Lee Moore
Part 1 – Strategies for Scaling Out, Up and Deep
A key question on the minds of many social change practitioners and funders is “how do we scale up our
impact?” Many feel overwhelmed by the fact that they have invested resources for decades into
numerous local projects, which have great results, but that fail to collectively change the overall state of
the system. While oversimplified tips do exist for scaling social innovation, the findings in this study
reveal a new, and far more complex picture of what is entailed with “going to scale”.
Research in social innovation and social enterprise has focused on the strategies required to move ideas
from one context to a larger scale (Bradach, 2010, Evans & Clarke, 2011, McPhedran et al., 2011,
Mulgan et al., 2008). From a social innovation perspective, large-scale change will necessarily involve
changes to rules, resource flows, cultural beliefs and relationships in a social system at multiple spatial
or institutional scales. However, in social entrepreneurship and social enterprise studies, the emphasis
on “scaling for impact” often reflects a product and consumer orientation, synonymous with diffusion or
replication of a program, product, or organizational model in multiple geographic locations and contexts
to maximize the number of people that a social innovation reaches (Dees et al., 2004, Wei-skillern &
Anderson, 2003, Mulgan et al., 2008). Even authors who recognize that transformative social innovation
will require more than just replicating a program (e.g. Bradach & Grindle, 2014, Ross, 2014) tend to
emphasize diffusion – the process by which social innovations spread across geographies, populations,
and jurisdictions. However, scaling social innovations to effect larger-scale change involves a more
complex and diverse process than simply ‘diffusing’ or spreading a product or model. Specifically, it is
important to learn about the process of how social systems and institutions can be deliberately impacted
through the work of organizations, foundations, and other agents of change.
Westley et al. (2014) characterized the dynamics and pathways of scaling in cases of social innovation
by describing five unique pathways to advance systemic change. They differentiate between two kinds of
scaling: ‘scaling out’, where an organization attempts to affect more people and cover a larger
geographic area through replication and diffusion, and ‘scaling up’, where an organization aims to affect
everybody who is in need of the social innovation they offer, or to aims to address the broader
institutional or systemic roots of a problem (Westley et al. 2014). Our research builds on the distinction
between scaling out and scaling up, adding new insights by describing the associated strategies, and
adding a third kind: ‘scaling deep’. We create a typology of these three approaches to scaling which
underscores the complexities and complementary nature of the strategies involved in advancing large
systems change, opening up new avenues for non-profit leaders to consider, and illuminating the role of
funders and conveners in amplifying the system-wide impacts of social change initiatives.
1.1 A Typology of Routes to Systemic Impact:
Scaling out, Scaling up and Scaling deep
Our research found five cross-cutting scaling strategies, and five unique strategies that we have
categorized into 3 broad types, refining Westley et al.’s (2014) distinction between scaling out and up,
where scaling up refers to the breadth of changes to human social systems or institutions - in both their
cultural dimensions, or their rules and policies. However, because of the unique strategies involved in
these two kinds of institutional change, we suggest the third category of “scaling deep”3. “Scaling out”
was the approach that McConnell Foundation staff and the AD learning group focused on originally,
emphasizing replication of successful innovations in different communities, with the hopes of spreading
those same results to more people. While at least one organization has found this to be an enduring
means to deal with context-specific issues that affect the system they are trying to change, the majority
3 The term “scale deep” was coined by AD group participant Tatiana Fraser, co-founder of Girls Action
Foundation.
[ 12 ]
Scaling Out, Scaling Up, and Scaling Deep!
by Darcy Riddell and Michele-Lee Moore
of participants found that reproducing an initiative might never address the root of the problem, if its’
roots lay within broader institutions. For many initiatives, the route to greater impact lay in changing
institutions and laws, or “scaling up” to affect policies. Many participants described the shift in their
scaling efforts to focus on the policy level because it has “the largest impact” and was capable of
changing the “rules of the game”. Strategies for “scaling deep” related to the notion that durable change
has been achieved only when people’s hearts and minds, their values and cultural practices, and the
quality of relationships they have, are transformed (see Figure 1 and Table 1).
Figure 1. Scaling out, scaling up and scaling deep for social innovation
The following sections describe the different strategies based on these types of scaling, in addition to
five cross-cutting strategies. Key lessons that emerged showed: 1) scaling an initiative to achieve a
broader systemic change often requires an initial reframing of organizational purposes; 2) specific
strategies are associated with the different types of scaling out, up and deep; and 3) additional cross-
cutting strategies were employed including building partnerships and networks, developing new
resources and financial models, and a commitment to evaluation and research. These strategies are
summarized below in Table 1. Finally some of the organizational and leadership challenges that
accompany scaling efforts are also discussed.
Scale!Up:!!
"Impac'ng*laws*and*
policy"*
Changing!ins)tu)ons!at!the!
level!of!policy,!rules!and!
laws!
Scale!Out:!!
"Impac'ng*greater*
numbers"*
Replica)on!and!
dissemina)on,!
increasing!number!of!
people!or!communi)es!
impacted!
!!
!
Scale!Deep:!!
"Impac'ng*cultural*
roots"*
Changing!rela)onships,!
cultural!values!and!
beliefs,!"hearts!and!
minds"!
[ 13 ]
Scaling Out, Scaling Up, and Scaling Deep!
by Darcy Riddell and Michele-Lee Moore
Table 1. Types of “scaling” and their main strategies
Description
Main Strategies
Scaling Out:
Impacting greater numbers. Based
on the recognition that many good
ideas or initiatives never spread or
achieve widespread impact.
Deliberate replication:
Replicating or spreading programs
geographically and to greater
numbers
Spreading principles:
Disseminate principles, with
adaptation to new contexts via co-
generation of knowledge
Scaling Up:
Impacting law and policy. Based on
the recognition that the roots of
social problems transcend particular
places, and innovative approaches
must be codified in law, policy and
institutions.
Policy or legal change efforts:
New policy development,
partnering, advocacy to advance
legal change and redirect
institutional resources.
Scaling
Deep:
Impacting cultural roots. Based on
the recognition that culture plays a
powerful role in shifting problem-
domains, and change must be
deeply rooted in people,
relationships, communities and
cultures.
Spreading big cultural ideas and
using stories to change beliefs and
norms
Investing in transformative
learning and communities of
practice
Cross-
cutting
strategies
for scaling:
Cross-cutting strategies were those
approaches all participants reported
using to scale their initiatives, and
were not specifically associated with
scaling out, up, or deep.
Making scale a conscious
choice
Analyzing root causes and
clarifying purpose
Building networks and
partnerships
Seeking new resources
Commitment to evaluation
1.2 The
Why
and
What
of Scaling: Reframing Purpose Using Systems Thinking
In each of the organizations involved in the Applied Dissemination learning group, an initiative had
begun at a community level. As organizations and their partners began to advance towards scaling
those initiatives to have broader impact, they often found that this could not be done without addressing
their own internal, organizational structure or culture first. Each participant described the need to clarify
and even reframe their organization’s purpose, given that they were moving towards creating change at
a larger scale and were no longer a community-based or solely community-focused organization.
The clarification and reframing occurred in two major ways, which we identify as cross-cutting strategies
for scaling which occurred at an early stage in the Applied Dissemination journey: A) by making scale
and impact a conscious choice, and B) by analyzing root causes using systems thinking, and
clarifying the purpose of their innovation. The consequence was that as they reframed their work
and initiated new efforts for scaling up their impact, the “product” or the “what” that they had worked on
for so many years had shifted. At times, this created tensions within the organization, and thus,
managing the internal, organizational change became just as important for this group of individuals as
managing the process to scale their initiative.
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1.2.1 Making Scale and Impact a Conscious Choice
“Being part of a large group that is thinking about dissemination and scaling in very grounded
ways pushed us (our board and staff) to clarify in our own minds what exactly we should be
scaling. And it gave us a container and framing in which to do that.”
“The process helped us to name our "agency" in creating a bigger footprint of mission impact.”
“We were not scaling strategically at the beginning. We were all over the place at first”.
A key element of the learning objectives associated with the AD learning group was simply: making
scaling and acceleration of impact a conscious choice. Since their previous focus had been on their
community initiatives, practitioners described the importance of making scaling or the pursuit of greater
impact an explicit and central part of their organizations’ strategies. Different organizations expressed
their new commitment to scaling in different ways, whether it was through vision statements that were
shared on public websites, or through internal communication processes that helped establish
agreement amongst staff to commit to having a greater impact. Regardless of the means, each
participant agreed that a process internal to the organization was required, given that this shift affected
the goals of the organization.
1.2.2 Analyzing Root Causes and Clarifying Purpose
The organizations involved in the AD learning group began with a particular issue-focus such as girl’s
empowerment, preventing youth incarceration, building networks of support around people with
disabilities, and reducing poverty in communities. Their organizational strategies were most often
focused on particular populations, in specific regions. However, through participation with the AD
learning group, participants realized that they could not achieve their goals of scale and impact unless
they reframed their purpose within a wider problem-frame.
Several participants described how adopting a systems-change perspective (using systems and
complexity frameworks introduced by Westley et al., 2006) was critical to building this consciousness
and intention to change. Broadening their problem definition using systems thinking led several
organizations to re-conceptualize their goals, as they shifted from being focused on a specific issue, to
being more deliberately focused on solving the roots of the problem. For example, the Executive Director
of Meal Exchange observed, “It allowed me to evolve Meal Exchange beyond an emergency food
charitable organization to a food security/food systems organization. It provided me the mental model
and questions to guide the work: “how do you make access to healthy food systemic? To what end?”
Different organizations expressed their new commitment to scaling and systemic impact in different
ways. For instance, two organizations formally re-drafted their organizational vision/mission statements
to incorporate clear intentions to effect systemic change rather than focusing on a single issue. Other
participants used internal communication processes (both formal and informal) to establish agreement
amongst staff to reorienting for greater impact.
At the heart of “applied dissemination” was the insight that in order for socially innovative ideas or
practices to spread, they must be applied within new contexts, and may change as a result. “What”
innovation the organization scaled often was redefined because of the practice of considering impacts
on the system at the broadest scale.
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1.3 The
How
of Scaling: Strategies for Scaling Out, Up and Deep
“We have learned that there are many ways to scale socially innovative initiatives. One way is to
add more people, groups, or communities to the effort. A second way is to document and
disseminate stories of exemplary efforts so that these can be adapted and applied to other
communities. A third way is to work at a policy level so that the effort can have a broad impact -
whether it is local, regional, provincial, territorial or national.”
Once they made scaling a deliberate choice, the organizations and individuals who participated in the
AD learning group employed many strategies to spread their social innovations and also to challenge the
systemic problems at the root of their issues. The chosen strategy was dependent on many factors - the
founding conditions of their organization, the context surrounding their issue, the resources and support
they could access, choices they made about who to partner with and how to achieve impact, and the
windows of opportunity - political, cultural and social - that emerged. Here, we describe the core
approaches these socially innovative organizations advanced, the interaction between different
strategies, and the relevant learning that led to an evolution in approach. The core scaling strategies
were summarized in Table 1.
Participants also articulated that these different approaches were useful for different kinds of scaling.
That is, going to scale can involve: scaling out, scaling up, or scaling deep, and often the relationship
among these three types is in sequence.
1.3.1 Scaling out by deliberate replication
Initially, organizations participating in the AD learning group were focused on the types of diffusion
activities documented in previous scaling literature (Dees et al., 2004, Bradach, 2010). That is, efforts
focused on expanding the geographic scale of programs or initiatives, and increasing the number of
people impacted by a social innovation. Leaders made decisions about whether to grow in a centralized
manner, to franchise, to pursue other “social enterprise” models, or to “seed” like-minded organizations
through affiliation, branching, or accreditation systems. Important supports in these efforts included
partnerships, shared learning, and developmental evaluation methods to improve impact measurement
and establish robust evidence. Having clear systems-change goals helped those forging ahead with
replication strategies to recognize the importance of ensuring impact and successes over the long term.
An important part of successful replication involved defining what was being spread and developing clear
implementation practices to ensure ongoing quality control. Sometimes program replication was
approached as a social enterprise, to tap into market forces for scaling. For programs that were going
into schools - such as SNAP, which was focused on youth at risk, and the Roots of Empathy, which
involved bringing babies into classrooms to teach empathy and discourage bullying - it was very
important for the proponents to amass strong empirical evidence, and also to explain the concrete
benefits of their programs.
“As we learned that we were replicable and we could scale (1 site to over 100), we realized that
the number was not as important as the impact and the sustainability factor. If you cannot
replicate your program and ensure it is done with high integrity and fidelity (achieve positive
outcomes you know the program can achieve) and ensure the program can be sustainable, then
your efforts of scaling are fruitless.”
Protecting the integrity and fidelity became referred to in the AD learning group as Zimmerman et al.’s
(1998) “min specs” or minimum specifications. That is, leaders needed to determine what the non-
negotiable aspects were, and what could vary when replicating, to ensure they were achieving a
sustainable impact along with scale.
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Other limitations with replication also began to be felt by leaders of some initiatives, who began to
critique the isolated use of scaling out strategies and emphasize the impact and durability of a change.
For example, one participant reflected:
“Communities are unique and there are some common concepts that we must take care of if we
really want any concept to be firmly rooted in a community. You can’t just transport it in a box.
And I think there’s a lot of confusion in some places with the concept of scale and impact that, in
some cases, impact is simply defined as the number of widgets you’ve spread.”
So, while many of the social innovators involved in the AD learning group were successfully replicating
and expanding their programs, they were also learning how to define, measure, refine and guard the
positive social impacts of their innovation. For some, this meant protecting program “fidelity and integrity”
and ensuring that the essence of the innovation was retained while it spread, and for others it was
through gaining clarity that the goal was spreading principles rather than a specific program or policy.
Still others moved beyond emphasis on scaling out strategies to scale up and deep.
1.3.2 Scaling out by spreading principles
“You can scale an idea that lives out differently in every context.”
The leaders who decided not to scale specific programs or who moved on from replication often turned
to the dissemination of principles as a strategy for broadening their impact. Disseminating principles, and
not programs, introduced the challenge of protecting the original vision, often times because
organizations began to rely on a larger number of staff, or on partner organizations to help scale the
innovation. Some organizations that elected to scale in this way honed their capacity to disseminate
knowledge, while protecting the integrity of the innovation:
“We had to be very careful about articulating clearly the principles that were guiding our actions
and that we always made sure, I think, to stick to those principles to the extent that we could.
Those were our real guide-posts. And so groups could feel free to undertake whatever activity
they wanted to, but they couldn’t deviate from the overarching principles that we had set that
bound us together as a collective, as a group.”
A potential drawback of this approach was the intensive work involved in scaling out in numerous
different contexts, when there was no specific “product” to simply adopt. As one participant described:
“obviously, they would need to do a lot of the local homework around how they could implement this idea
in their own municipality or town or community, and it may or may not be possible at the end of the day.”
Tamarack addressed this challenge in part by creating a national-scale learning community for anti-
poverty initiatives in hundreds of communities in Canada and the United States - blending a scaling out
strategy with a scaling deep strategy.
Distilling the essence of an innovation in order to scale can lead to other insights about system-level
impact. One participant described how after 30 years of successful work, even the protection of his
organization’s core vision began to feel like a limiting behavior, as their scaling efforts gained momentum
internationally and they embraced greater “mission diversity”:
“We are an organization that has always had a very strong vision and exceptionally high
ownership of core values among a very diverse group of people. We began to see that this
strength was getting in the way of thinking about the new and diversifying our model in the
service of growth. The insight that we might focus on minimizing our specifications of the
boundaries of growth has been important for us. This has taken several years.”
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This participant went on to emphasize how his current practice, with 50 seed projects, was about letting
go of these self-imposed limits to allow new ideas to flourish.
Another participant, from Engineers Without Borders expressed a different version of this “open scaling”
strategy, as their work relies on young professionals working globally:
“Our definition of scaling out is seeing a set of cultural practices and behaviours around
innovation and systems thinking in larger numbers of youth. We spend time nurturing the DNA of
how we work, then give free reign. Layer on infrastructure: chapters, coaching support, programs
etc. Then the DNA and infrastructure interact to create a powerful scaling out dynamic.”
This interaction between the “DNA” of established cultural practice and infrastructure of support speaks
to the importance of seeding learning environments as a key capacity for scaling.
1.3.3 Scaling up by pursuing policy change
“We don’t have to have more chapters or more people involved, or expand to new regions - we
can take the issue and get it into the policy domain, have public policy discussions and scale
those up.”
Spreading successful programs or initiatives by increasing the number of people and the geographic
area served is one approach to scaling. Spreading the principles upon which the social change is
predicated is another. Yet, for many social innovators, an equally powerful opportunity lies in impacting
higher levels of institutions through policy change. Many participants described the shift in their scaling
efforts to focus on the policy level because it has “the largest impact on greatest number”. One person
described how policy change is necessary for the disruption of failing systems and their transformation to
something better. Participants described at least two approaches for scaling up. In the first approach,
pointed to in the quotation above, social innovators working at the level of families or communities
shifted their work to higher levels in government in order to address root causes in larger-scale
institutions that affected an entire population.
An example of this is the work of Planned Lifetime Advocacy Network (PLAN) in their creation of the
world’s first Registered Disabilities Savings Plan, which changed the financial regulations guiding
savings and benefits for people with disabilities and enabled them to escape financial dependency on
the state. Creating new policy or regulatory frameworks was seen as part of disrupting existing systems
and transforming them into something better. This differed from replication strategies, since it often
meant leaving behind the initial innovative initiative, and starting a new initiative focused on policy
change.
The second approach for scaling up focused on linking together community-level policy interventions into
a more coherent movement. Interestingly, just as application within the local context is important when
disseminating new ideas and programs, it was also seen as critical when scaling policy change from one
community to another: “One of the things that we learned in trying to scale up in terms of policy related
work was that context really mattered…We had to learn how to identify local problems and turn these
into policy issues - whether at the federal, provincial or municipal level.” Those leaders who were
seeking to scale policies faced challenges because municipal contexts and regional (provincial) policies
vary greatly across Canada, and approaches had to be adapted to new locations each time. One
participant described that her organization’s response to this challenge was to look for the “essence of
the idea” to take across the country through sharing stories of policy change, because jurisdictional
differences can hamper scaling efforts.
1.3.4 Scaling deep by generating big cultural ideas
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“Our language changed – from feed the hungry to ‘good food for all’”
“It is about learning and change. We do not solve problems; we all learn to live differently in a way
that the problem can no longer exist.”
As an adjunct to other scaling strategies, many participants began to deliberately reorient their work,
reframing predominant narratives and working to change the culture, beliefs and norms surrounding the
social issues they were seeking to address. As one participant noted, “scaling means changing the
frame”. Another observed that big ideas are scalable - capable of getting at the cultural beliefs lying at
the roots of many social problems. This was characterized by a leader with L’Arche, an organization
focused on people with disabilities:
“We have, with others, been successful in reframing the goal of disability support from charity to
contribution, from group to individual, from need to asset, and to significantly reduce the stigma
attached to intellectual disability. Much more work to do, but today, as opposed to 10 years ago,
the goals of belonging and citizenship for people with intellectual disabilities are widely
accepted.”
*
Culture change strategies varied tremendously, but several examples included using stories as a
method for sharing and co-creating ideas. One practitioner explained that amalgamating stories from the
individuals affected by the relevant social issues, and translating them into a resonant framing enabled
individual anecdotes to tell a more systemic story about the need for change. Our findings suggest that
creating new stories and amplifying those that exist can become an important vehicle for generating
cultural ideas and thus, scaling deep to affect the cultural landscape.
1.3.5 Scaling deep by investing in transformative learning
“What we learned was how to develop a community of learning that in turn develops the growth
and development of the networks we created. It is the connectedness that is the strength of our
networks and this connectedness can only be created through sharing experiences and best
practices.”
“What it was we wanted to scale was an experience rather than a particular program or process”
A common strategy to increase the scale and impact of socially innovative initiatives is to invest in
learning processes (e.g. Dweck, 2007, Crutchfield & McLeod Grant, 2008). The cultivation of learning
communities can both spread knowledge and foster innovative relationships, which in turn spread and
model new content, processes and practices. Investment in such learning by AD participant
organizations became a specific strategy used to build shared mindsets across a range of sectors and
organizations, to ensure the impact of their initiative was scaled deep into the defining routines, practices
and beliefs of partners and collaborators. Participants described how learning processes for scaling can
be supported by a range of methods, including: mentorship, deliberate transfer of practices, capturing
and sharing organizational or community culture, and shared reflection and evaluation practices.
Interestingly, many AD learning group participants who used learning communities as a central means of
scaling credited their experience in the AD learning group itself as the inspiration or model.
“For us, the biggest learning was that too often people try to scale the forms of social change and
forget that it's the experience of change that we're after. And that replicating even the most simple
process or project will often not scale because it is not continuously checked and re-checked
against the experience of those on the ground”.
Learning communities helped people to embody change. The above quote speaks to the capacity of a
learning community to both honour people’s on-the-ground experience, and to engage people to
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experience new possibilities. This enabled new knowledge and approaches to be spread widely, and
ensured that what was spread was valuable and relevant to the people affected. As multiple
experiments occurred in diverse locations, groups networked in learning communities were able to share
new insights and evolve their collective practice. It is more effective to foster learning in a network or
community when this stance is also internalized within the organizations leading change initiatives.
From this perspective, the means of engagement and the ends of social change are intertwined. One
practitioner said it all starts with a small group “equally concerned with involvement and getting the idea
right.” Another emphasized the role of community-building, “In order for a socially innovative (outside of
the box) initiative to grow, it must create a sense of community. There has to be a connection between
all of the parts that is a place for sharing, worrying, helping, and supporting in a group.” Some
participants in the AD group cemented their commitment to distributed learning approaches because of
their exposure to complexity and systems thinking, adult education and coaching methods, and open
source models:
“It was the strategic frameworks and articulation that allowed us to develop a model that
encouraged and supported innovation and decision-making in a highly distributed way around
EWB. This served to unlock the potential and creativity of thousands, rather than centralizing idea
formulation and innovation in the hands of a small few.”
In most cases distributed and experiential learning approaches were linked to networks and partnerships
as strategies for scaling. The following two strategies were found to be cross-cutting, building on the two
described above – that of making scale a conscious choice, and analyzing the roots of problems to
clarify purpose.
1.3.6 Cross-cutting strategies for scale: Building networks and partnerships
“We have used these principles in the growth and development of networks across the province
and they in turn are doing the same with their partners. Our staff, as well, has embraced this
approach. They have witnessed first hand how, through developing a community of learning and
practice, we have strengthened our networking approach and developed much faster by bringing
together the networks to share best practices and knowledge gained from experience.”
Strong networks and partnerships that enable access to decision-makers, funds, allies, and others
supporters proved to be critical to the successful scaling of many of the participants’ social innovations,
regardless of whether the type of scaling they pursued. Networks are well-suited to knowledge-
dissemination and shared learning strategies - as both an audience, and as a source of stories to
document and share. Different participants described how networks have been central to their strategy:
“… we did an evaluation of our projects last year with an outside evaluator and that was one of
the things that came back very strongly - that the networks felt like they have access to all of us
whenever they want, that there’s no hierarchy and, it’s a very open system. So I think that’s
something that has been very helpful in making the other organizations develop well and faster…”
“The next stage of our growth is entirely dependent on building partnerships/allying with other
groups -- organizations, companies, government -- to scale out or scale up our social innovations.
These will either be in collective and coordinated action toward a common purpose (e.g. allies in
the same space on engineering education, but who are focusing more on environmental
innovations), in jointly bringing assets to bear on common challenges (e.g. emerging work with
the new young leadership program), and in having allies who have natural mechanisms for scale
(e.g. workplace intrapraneurship partnership emerging with a global engineering firm).”
Partnerships across sectors are particularly valuable for addressing cross-cutting issues from a common
sense of purpose. Partnerships allow more targeted approaches, focused collaboration, resource-
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pooling, extension of influence, and unusual alliances. One participant noted that partnerships with
global entities offer natural scaling mechanisms. Another noted that how an organization models
openness, learning, and partnership is key to successful collaborations, and that success in this regard
hinges on internal organizational and leadership capacities.
1.3.7 Cross-cutting strategies for scale: New resources and funding models
“We came to understand that in order to grow, we had to build organizational capacity and we
have done so in an effective manner over several years. As a more mature organization we
needed to allocate new resources to growth and development”.
All participants acknowledged that scaling their ideas, process, or programs required either new funding,
or entirely new funding models from their original initiatives. Practitioners described the importance of
identifying and leveraging new resources, especially through collaboration and private sector
partnerships. One participant acknowledged that the confidence gained through the AD learning group
emboldened them to ask for help from the private sector. The result was articulated as the following:
“We’ve had a very, very positive experience over the last three years…of working with people
from the private sector that helped us put wheels on what we wanted to do, and in particular,
through a board member and through contacts, we were able to pull together a group of about six
or seven people who either were, or had worked with McKinsey Consultants. And we spent a
year working on the strategy”.
Another person recognized that there was a need for a larger pool of true impact investors in Canada
who would be willing to balance impact with returns; that is, neither government grants nor the
McConnell Foundation could or should be expected to support all of the scaling possibilities. But funding
not only supported the scaling process, it was also seen as necessary before scaling was possible
because of the need to invest in the baseline capacity of organizations. As one person stated:
“Innovators need funds that are longer-term and allow us to pre-grow our base capacity to scale social
innovations in the future.”
1.3.8 Cross-cutting strategies for scale: Commitment to evaluation and research
As a result of the approaches introduced during the learning sessions, participants grew their
commitment to using evaluation and data as feedback to adapt their practice. Many were using
developmental evaluation, due to its ability to examine broad ad emergent impacts, and the subtle but
powerful shifts in attitudes and relationships that may accompany dissemination or scaling efforts, but
might be overlooked by traditional summative evaluation methods.
“And so one of the things we learned was to pay attention to the community changes taking place
around us as a result of the work, even though it wasn’t necessarily something that we were
counting in terms of strict poverty reduction. But that if organizations were collaborating or
working better together or having an improved system for training, for example -- that was
important and significant”.
In addition to providing evidence, evaluation methods have been embraced by many of the AD
participants as a way to embed organizational learning processes. For one organization in particular,
scaling involved a heavy reliance on research that was rigorous and helped to establish evidence-based
choices for policy or program change:
“Replication isn’t the problem. Doing it with integrity is hard. Growth doesn’t just happen, growth
has implications for leadership and for “product”. Experimentation is important, rigorous and
disciplined planning is important.”
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“…we continue to be an applied scientist practitioner model. This focus has enabled us to ensure
we are in fact developing a cost efficient effective intervention for children and their families
experiencing emotional regulation, self-control and problem solving issues. Cost benefit analysis
findings reveal that we can be incredibly cost effective and save society huge costs in the long
run.”
In essence, participants learned to evaluate the process and the outcomes of their work, and applied
evaluation approaches that could capture impacts at different scales and phases of change.
1.4 The Evolution of Practitioner Understanding about Scaling and Impact
“Impact, durability and scale are interconnected. Scale alone is not enough.”
“We have learned, however, that growing programs is only one approach, and that it has
limitations. Innovative leaders also need relevant and timely research, customized training, and
the opportunity to forge alliances with influential individuals, institutions, and organizations. Most
of all, they need unflinching support to enable them to explore and make mistakes. These
processes are essential to learning, to the discovery of new and lasting solutions to chronic
problems, and to the pursuit of the sustainable world to which we are all committed.”
It was clear based on the reflections of participants that in 2002 when the AD learning group began,
“scaling” was initially defined by everyone in the group, including the McConnell staff, as replication,
dissemination, or “scaling out” the same successful innovation with the hopes of spreading those same
results to more people. But after a short time, some participants realized that replication could go on
forever and would never address the root of the systemic problem, which lay within governing
institutions, including policies and laws. In these instances, the individuals involved decided to focus on
change initiatives at that institutional scale. Therefore, “scaling up” meant no longer focusing on the
original innovation. With this new focus, participants recognized that the integrity, principles, and values
embedded in the organization’s original mission had to be carried forward as they shifted to intervene at
higher scales.
For others, scaling out was eventually deemed insufficient once there was recognition that deeper
cultural shifts were needed to address the context holding the problem in place. That is, transformation
needed to focus on social norms, beliefs, and relationships (whether those were between children in a
school, across sectors, or levels of government). Therefore, scaling impact required changing deeply
held cultures, or “scaling deep” (see Figure 1 and Table 1). Several participants sought to achieve this
by emphasizing learning communities and creating new forms of experience and awareness, through
whole systems and distributed engagement approaches, such as Tamarack and Caledon Institute
through Vibrant Communities, and Engineers Without Borders. In these cases, protecting the “DNA” or
the core principles also remained important.
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Ultimately, the terminology to describe scaling became very fluid as time passed and appears to be used
differently by diverse practitioners, despite them being part of the same community of practice. But
regardless of the small differences in framing, what becomes clear is an evolution in the way
practitioners are thinking about, and attempting to achieve, scale. Most initiatives blended different
approaches, emphasizing different types of scale at different phases of the process in order to achieve
greater impact on the social issues of deepest concern to them. Two patterns dominated for the
practitioners involved in this study: i) they moved from scaling out to scaling up, or ii) they moved from
scaling out to scaling deep:
From scaling out to scaling up: In which many practitioners redefined scaling to expand beyond
replication or dissemination to include significant scaling up to achieve systemic impact through new
policies or institutionalization at higher scales. “From our perspective, in particular, going to scale meant
growing geographically in terms of the community-based initiative we were advocating. But going to
scale also meant influencing relevant policies in order to have the largest possible impact on the greatest
number of people.”
From scaling out to scaling deep: Most practitioners have also expanded from scaling out, to thinking
about how to deeply affect and impact the “root” of the systemic problem, and how to stimulate
transformation in place, in self, in culture. This has been pursued through protecting the positive intent
and impact of a program while focusing on transforming long-term relationships, but also by targeting
large-scale cultural change and the need to shift underlying patterns of belief that caused problems in
the first place.
Regardless of which scaling sequence they undertook, all of the practitioners recognized the importance
of capacity-building and learning, both through the AD learning group and through their own
organizational and network processes. Arguably, the requirement for learning is one thread that helps to
distinguish social innovation for system change from notions of scaling and replication that are often
observed in business and social enterprise models. With system change as a goal, whole-system
engagement and learning is crucial so that social innovations can spread and take root in very different
regulatory, social, cultural contexts. Often, social innovations cannot rely on the disseminating force of
markets - which for social enterprises act as a scaling mechanism. This is because social innovations
may be addressing a market failure, or at an even deeper level, the logic and assumptions of markets
may actually be part of the root causes of many persistent social and ecological problems. These
findings suggest that learning processes play a role of great significance in the scaling of social
innovations, as both ends and means.
1.4 Challenges in Scaling
Inevitably, ambitious systems-change goals can present leadership, organizational and social
challenges. Some challenges described by the AD learning group emerged with success, and some
were specific to the original conditions, the nature of the social issue being addressed, and the scaling
strategies being pursued.4 Two key obstacles faced by the social innovators involved in the AD learning
group were: leadership challenges, and the need to manage growth.
4 For a detailed exploration of five pathways or configurations for systemic change that were pursued by
Applied Dissemination participants, as well as a discussion of the unique challenges associated with
each pathway, see Westley et al. 2014.
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Leadership challenges
“Note to self. Do not underestimate the resistance that will come from within and without. It takes
great commitment and time and energy to grow into the new. In our larger and decentralized
organization, we are not always unified as we struggle to hold together the old and the new, the
"system" and the individual, growth in numbers and growth in character and leadership, the
simplicity with running alone and the complexity of partnering with others for greater impact, and
the longing for stability and completion with the reality that change is our constant companion.”
Several participants noted that one of the greatest challenges with scaling social innovation related to
their own capacity to act as leaders, as opposed to solely relating to the process of scaling the
innovative initiative itself. Practitioners who were leading significant change in their initiatives often spoke
of the personal toll it took on them, and of the inner resources needed to continue. The AD learning
community provided a safe space to reflect on the leadership challenges associated with scaling, among
peers with a common experience. Here, participants were supported both in their vulnerability and in
their development of new capacities. As one innovator described:
“… to me this question of stress and the capacity to manage the ambiguity and to inspire others
to stay with you in the ambiguity, is a key capacity. And when we talk about key leadership
challenges, it’s certainly maintaining in oneself that capacity over time. Because none of this
work, if we’re really talking about impact, durability and scale, is in any way a short fix.”
Several people acknowledged that throughout the years when the AD learning group met, and in the
years that have followed since, they were exhausted and stressed from their work. In fact, one perceived
benefit of the AD learning group was that it served as an acknowledgement for the work, and gave the
participants permission to take a break, to delegate, and reap rewards from the support that surrounded
them if it was needed. This theme is taken up again in Part 2, where the design and impacts of the
learning community is discussed in more detail.
Managing growth
In addition to needing to “recharge” at points during the innovation process, participants also noted
organizational management challenges that arose as they scaled up or out.
“Our idea is at scale, we are in a new space. We see possibility and have no idea how to
operate in the space of large-scale cultural and economic change.”
As the scaling process unfolded, practitioners faced a range of new challenges. For some, this meant
confronting the dilemma of investing different amounts of time with different audiences. But at least four
of the practitioners recognized that the most significant growth challenge revolved around the need to
balance the time and energy required for scaling with the requirements of the organization’s original
work or mission: “I think that there really is a lot of tension between managing the core organization and
the job of really spreading it”, observed one participant. Often, a socially innovative initiative is managed
and implemented by a small portion of a larger organization. But this creates tension, both with other
staff in the other sections of the organization, and at times with Board members who see the initiative as
an anomaly from the organization’s central mission. As one participant stated: “We ended up with a
‘business’ operating inside of a non-profit. We had conflicts between the ‘old’ and the ‘innovative’. Our
operational needs were different than other departments in the organization”. These internal tensions
were recognized as being as important, and sometimes more time consuming than any external
relationships that were required for scaling success. As one person described: “I underestimated the
time, skills, and talents required to get other colleagues within the organization to understand and
support what we were trying to do”. Ultimately, every participant agreed that the scaling process and the
internal and external organizational changes that enable this process, all take much longer time than
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expected. While the AD learning group provided time for participants to reflect and grow their own
practice, it also influenced the McConnell Foundation’s own practice.
How grantees’ scaling challenges changed McConnell Foundation practices
Unique relationships were created between the grantees of the AD learning group and the McConnell
Foundation. McConnell Foundation staff learned alongside grantees in real time, present to new insights,
shifts in strategy and knowledge generation and transfer. The Foundation developed more
comprehensive knowledge and understanding of the personal, organizational and social realities of the
grantees’ work. The power dynamics between funder and grantee began to equalize, and a level of trust
emerged that transformed the McConnell Foundation’s role into one of collaborator. This enabled the
McConnell Foundation to learn and adapt faster, shifting its practice and becoming an even more
engaged funder. For example, most of the grantees underestimated the time horizons, human and
financial resources, and leadership challenges involved in scaling efforts. Often grantees did not
anticipate the impact of scaling on their own organizations and had not built in backfill plans for the time
and effort required of leadership staff involved in scaling an initiative. The McConnell Foundation’s
willingness to allow flexibility in the use of funds was an enabling condition for successful scaling,
particularly as much of the work was uncharted territory. The McConnell Foundation decided to extend
its original commitment to the AD granting program and shifted its practice of not renewing grants to the
same organizations, which led to maintaining relationships for upwards of 10 years, since the time
horizons for scaling were longer than were previously conceived and planned. And as the success and
impact of AD learning group became increasingly obvious, it also decided to continue convening the
group beyond its initial plan, which required an additional commitment of financial and human resources.
It also began convening other clusters of grantees working in common domain areas as school-based
sustainability education, and those working as intermediaries or backbone organizations.
Summary
Part I of this report highlighted that strategies for scaling social innovations go far beyond simply
disseminating or replicating promising initiatives. When practitioners shift their focus to scaling for
systems change – seeking to impact broader institutions, or deeply held cultural beliefs and norms –
their purpose may need to be reframed through deeper analysis of root causes. Using complexity and
systems thinking perspectives can help to provide the vocabulary and the tools to “see” the broader
system holding a particular social problem in place. Different sets of strategies may be used to scale out,
up, or deep, but since “what” practitioners’ are scaling may be changing to suit different scales and
contexts, protecting the values and principles upon which an organization operates can be essential.
Over time, multiple approaches to scaling may be necessary if systemic impacts are sought – from
spreading an initiative (scaling out) to scaling up work for policy change, or scaling deep to address the
relationships, values and cultural patterns holding a social problem in place. As scaling occurs, it is also
important to invest in leaders, so their efforts can persist for the duration of time required for scaling an
initiative. Otherwise, these issues can form barriers that frustrate or stall otherwise successful ideas and
initiatives. Applied learning processes, such as the AD learning group, can serve as an important forum
to address these challenges, but thoughtful design and implementation of the learning process is
required. The core design elements of the AD learning group are described in more detail the next
section.
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Part 2 – Designing Learning Processes To Scale Social Innovation
2.1 Design of the Applied Dissemination Learning Group
“I think we really understood that we had the right partner <in McConnell>, because without that
funding commitment and then the AD Group - that just added so much…so much value to us.
Without those two things I know we wouldn’t be where we are today”.
The structure of the AD Group (and the McConnell leadership) provided a "container" for the discipline of
taking time out for support, learning and reflection. From the outset, every participant agreed that
participating in the AD learning group as a McConnell Foundation grantee had a positive impact on their
personal growth, their organization, and their initiative. In many cases, the specifics of the impact was
emergent or unexpected:
“There are a lot of really amazing unanticipated outcomes and I think the organization is right
where it needs to be, as innovative as ever and having a bigger impact than it ever had before.
But it’s not in the ways that we had laid out in that grant. But I do think that it is directly an impact
of being part of that group, receiving the grant, having access to the learning… the peer learning
and the support of the Foundation and those frameworks, and applying them to our work, to what
we were doing”.
In reflecting on the success of the initiative, participants pointed to specific aspects of the process and
design as critical, including: a) participant selection, b) the conditions created by the convenors
(McConnell Foundation staff) c) the culture and environment that the AD group created and nurtured
together, and d) the timely introduction of content and frameworks to support learning about scale and
impact.
2.1.1 Participants
“We didn’t have people to follow. There weren’t other organizations leading the way…so there
was a really important sense of camaraderie between the people in the room and, therefore, we
were able to understand one another very well”.
“Despite the wide ranging interests we all had, some fundamental shared elements really made
for amazing insight and sharing. For example we were all dealing with "breaking new ground"
"going where others fear to tread" or "having a vision about how to change things". The term
"founder" was often used to describe many of the people in the room and I think that element
about people really made things different. These were all people who started or help start some
fundamental change in their communities. These are people who were comfortable outside the
box and could make it work for them”.
Participants in the AD learning group came from a variety of backgrounds and worked on different social
and environmental challenges, such as attempting to: improve math proficiency in young students,
address poverty in communities across Canada, and build networks of support around people with
disabilities. Despite the differences, participants were more focused on the one similarity: their shared
purpose and experience. The practitioners in the learning group had all initiated promising changes in
their communities or fields, and faced similar leadership challenges in pioneering new approaches and
desiring to increase their scale and impact. This shared context enabled mutual support towards big
visions of change. One participant stated: “we could frighten ourselves with our dreams, and there was
a sense of - it’s possible…and creating the container for that was, I think, a very powerful act in and of
itself”. Participants described each other as people with passion, compassion, and dedication.
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2.1.2 Educational approach and design: Setting the container
Certain conditions were recognized as essential for creating a positive learning environment in which
learning could occur. Firstly, an experiential, peer-based and participatory approach was adopted in
recognition of the wisdom that the practitioners brought into the learning process. Multiple learning styles
were honoured in the group, and activities were deliberately paced and varied.
Secondly, at least four participants acknowledged that the McConnell Foundation staff demonstrated
leadership when they also joined the learning journey and seemed to embody or embrace many of the
key concepts. The impact was that their openness to learning minimized the power imbalance between
them and the other participants that the McConnell Foundation had convened. Moreover, funding was
not linked to the learning group’s activities – this time together for learning was separate from their grant-
related activities, and participants appreciated that this also reduced the power imbalance that can exist
between grantor/grantee.
The fact that each meeting was designed as a “retreat” with time spent overnight and away from
everyone’s workplace and daily routines was recognized as a critical factor that ensure that each one of
them was focused and engaged. The reasons for this importance were varied – for some participants, it
was because their funder was clearly giving them permission to take time and reflect: “That’s what I
loved about those applied dissemination meetings…it gave us permission to pause. It gave us
permission to say I don’t want you to do this right now. I need you to come here and just … be. And I
think that was important”.
Another person noted that once they were away with the AD group, everyone seemed to agree to
engage equally, and that it meant no one was quickly leaving the room for a meeting or to take a call:
“You <McConnell Foundation> were investing in us, so when we were there, we were THERE….
We are all busy, we are all being pulled in twenty directions. But we shut ourselves off to that
point of our world when we were attending those meetings. And I would say that the majority of
the time that we were there, everybody was actually ‘there’, if you know what I mean, they were
there ‘cause they wanted to be there…So nobody was more important than anybody else”.
Finally, the retreat-style meetings offered a sense of luxury and rejuvenation for participants – who were
often drained and exhausted from running their own organizations. “The wear and tear on the leaders of
innovation can be huge when you’re taking it to scale. ‘Cause you’re running and running and running,
and I don’t think you’re stopping and pausing and thinking”. The luxury was experienced due to leaving
other concerns behind, in the surroundings, and in being invited to take time to reflect, learn and connect
with their peers working on other issues.
2.1.3 Culture and Learning Environment
“I had an experience - and I know that other people did as well - of being deeply respected for the
personal commitments that we had made to take our initiatives or our organizations to another
level. And I like that word a lot… I like the word ‘respect’ a lot, partly because there’s a lot of
places where you actually feel not fully respected or not fully understood”.
“The trust and respect in the room were pervasive”
One consequence of the design of the AD learning group sessions (mixed learning activities, McConnell
Foundation and practitioner engagement, peer-support focus), and the fact that participants shared
common leadership challenges and situations, a deeply trusting and respectful learning environment
was established over time. Participants recalled the sessions together as a unique, safe space where
there were no penalties for failure-- a “safe harbour” to ask questions, experiment, and spark thinking.
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One participant shared the importance of respect in supporting learning and inspiration: “…the sense of
respect is really palpable and that stuff is just pure gold in terms of creating an environment for learning
and for hope to be kindled and rekindled…”.
The AD learning group was also a place to seek and provide support amongst peers. One participant
remembered watching another cry as they described the frustration they faced in making change happen
in their organization. The participant recognized that it was important to see that other strong leaders
could still be vulnerable – and that vulnerability was a normal or shared experience for all of them, “and
in that vulnerability of course, you’re open to learning”. Another participant appreciated the mutual
celebration when their AD peers accomplished new goals that had been surfaced through their learning
process.
Collectively, the shared ups and downs were important for building strong bonds amongst the
participants, as demonstrated by the following quote:
“And being able to walk with that solid cohort through the ups and downs… what became obvious
in some ways, with some of the participants, is that they really weren’t going to scale. Or there
was going to be a leadership transition or, you know, whatever. But that’s part of the rich learning
as well.”
Participants were taking risks – with their ideas, their financial resources, and with the social capital they
may have held in their community – so having a safe place where they could learn from each other was
invaluable. The trust, respect, and safety associated with the group was attributed to the design
elements of the learning sessions. Therefore, the learning culture and process design were intricately
linked. Examples of the designed “culture” elements included:
• Welcoming “the head and the heart” - the personal and intellectual
• assigning pairs to be “critical friends”
• blending opportunities and exercises to challenge and support each other
• clearly establishing the value of learning from failure
• setting a ground rule that there were “no penalties” (again, decoupling the funding from the McConnell
Foundation with learning outcomes helped alleviate fears of being penalized if they acknowledged
certain struggles or failures)
Overall, the process functioned to support not just individual learning, but the learning of the group,
which was called “very different” because of the quality of sustained conversation, and as a result, “very
powerful.”
2.1.4 Content: Knowledge, tools and methods from Applied Dissemination
“… our understanding of our own work and of social change theory, and what other organizations
were achieving, it was just being pushed, and I think our minds were being opened all the time.”
“The frameworks that were presented, particularly around panarchy and organizational growth,
helped contextualize and provide a language for understanding the progression of our
organization, culture and scale.”
The AD learning community was enriched by the inclusion of various experts, whose knowledge could
be applied to real-life organizational challenges. Several participants reflected that the introduction of
different frameworks and content was incredibly timely - meeting their need for learning just as certain
challenges arose. One appreciated “the extraordinary capacity of the organizers to find just the right
resources for us. To bring in just the right person with just the right tools to help us understand our own
experiences, which were not standard, and to move us along this path of sowing what we know.” Invited
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experts brought credible knowledge with framing relevant to practitioners, which influenced a different
quality of practice, and supported root analysis of problems. The concepts and analysis helped
participants “find vocabularies for their experience”.
Specific knowledge, frameworks and methods recognized by participants as crucial in their learning
about innovation, scaling and accelerating impact included:
• The adaptive cycle and the panarchy (resilience) model of H.S. Holling
• Complex systems thinking
• Developmental evaluation and other innovative evaluation methods
• Using collaborative and participatory approaches for every phase of innovation
• Case study analysis
• Peer input processes (circles to share a challenge and receive peer feedback)
The body of knowledge shared with participants emphasized the importance of collaboration,
partnership, participatory engagement, and social inclusion when addressing complex social challenges.
The content and design of learning sessions highlighted the value of including multiple perspectives, the
importance of ongoing learning and reflection, and the role of evaluation methods in both increasing
impact and supporting organizational learning. Distributed problem-solving approaches were modeled,
and participants were encouraged to think more broadly about their problem domain, their purpose in
seeking scale, and how to best intervene in systems to create the change they sought. One participant
described the impact that the McConnell Foundation grant officer had on their thinking: “she challenged
us to start to think strategically in where we were actually going, what was our vision, what was our
strategy, ‘cause we didn’t really have one, we just wanted to know we can replicate and we could be …
you know, we could try to meet every kid or family in Canada, United States or the world who needed it,
so we were all over the place.”
2.1.5 Validation through interactions with experts
“…bringing an academic element into my experience was very important. It was … not
legitimizing, but giving credibility and … you know, that people at the university level were looking
at the work that we are doing, and exploring the challenges that we’re facing and making sense of
it - with the panarchy model – it was really, really validating and a very important element, for me,
as an individual”.
One participant observed this value was tied to her own ability to later draw on that knowledge and
articulate her ideas with confidence to partner organizations:
“…the comfort that I developed with the role of being a leader in a new area - a territory that no
one dares to tread…My comfort level in those activities, I think, became much stronger when I felt
like I had a credible body of knowledge to build my arguments on”.
Some participants appreciated the academic experts, but also expressed appreciation that the sessions
were so applied and practitioner-focused, affirming how “profound learning is possible outside the
academy.” People consistently described the powerful impact of learning both from the successes of
their peers, and also from their struggles. Someone described the AD learning group as the “gift that
keeps on giving” because of the experts, the new information, and the safe space it provided for ongoing
exploration. A surprising number of participants mentioned that they still reviewed their notes regularly
as resources, and shared them with others in their organization - including the models and frameworks,
notes from peer input circles on a particular strategic challenge, and the valuable personal feedback they
were given by peers to reach for their highest passion and potential.
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2.2 Value of the AD Learning Group - Organizational and Personal Impacts
“I think the AD process has embedded a sense of ambition, critical thinking and a commitment to
share what they know in the culture of the organization, even if the specific methods the group
has chosen to scale up differ from the methods we were considering in the AD group”.
“I think what has happened with this McConnell process and all the support we were awarded
there through this whole journey we’ve been on, is I feel we got to the door of another phase of
our existence…”
The combination of the thoughtful design, the constructive and emotionally supportive learning
environment, and the expert and peer-driven content of the sessions led to significant personal and
organizational impacts, beyond the scaling of the innovative initiatives. The AD community of practice
was described as having a “seminal impact” and being of “outstanding importance” to one leader, who
reflected: “and I changed a lot of things, and I changed me, as a result.” Participants shared how the
safety of the group allowed for them to try things that had not been done before, and gave their
organization a new sense of direction and ambition to imagine greater impact. They also saw
themselves as resources for one another. One participant described how the AD learning group
supported personal integration, deeper focus, and accountability to a larger vision. Overall, the learning
group cultivated a sense of belonging and challenge, leading to “amazing, poignant and powerful shared
moments” as the group members grew together over many years. Participants also supported each
other in very concrete ways, opening fundraising doors and advancing scaling goals.
Participants recognized that the AD learning group had been a “deeply important time” for their
development as leaders, and that this “pulled the individual, their initiative, and their organization to a
higher standard”. In that sense, there was an individual accountability that was created from having to
meet the other practitioners once a year and to discuss their progress. The frameworks, tools, and
processes impacted both their daily life and their organizational strategic planning, and many
participants cited how the AD learning group experience was critical for taking their organizations to the
“next stage”. This included growing participants’ confidence to lead systemic change and evolve their
models, as well as affirming the scaling efforts they were already pursuing. Such learning then diffused
further, when participants sought to develop similar capacities in senior leaders and board members
within their organizations, as well as with partnering organizations and networks.
More than one participant acknowledged that the tools and awareness that they learned helped them to
face common struggles and recognize that organizational fragility while undergoing change initiatives
was inevitable and a natural part of the process. In particular, the collective learning process improved
their ability to “see” new choices or different possibilities for their initiatives. “I learned that I could do (Y)
or (Z) and I didn’t just have to do (X)”. Sometimes, that choice also involved saying “no” to certain
projects or partners, to protect the integrity of their vision, or to learn to “let go”. As one leader put it:
“If you believe in something so strongly, at some point, there is a time where you need to let go.
And so part of my process in learning has been that I don’t have to be everything for everything
we do. And I have great people that have grown and have done some amazing learnings in their
positions. And now they’re disseminating, and they’re growing and they’re leading these pieces
of it. So I think that was an important piece of learning: to let go”.
Given the rewards and impact of the AD learning group, a number of participants went on to use the
principles of experiential and group learning within their own organization or networks, coming to view
collaborative learning as an essential part of the innovation process. In a sense, the AD learning group
was a microcosm and an example of how to scale: “Hands down, the most concrete benefits of
participating in the AD group for us were the modeling of the process, the approach and the critical
elements.”
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For those groups whose mission required the dissemination of systems thinking and new models of
collaboration, the convening methods, frameworks, and peer-learning processes demonstrated in the AD
community of practice became central to their own engagement and scaling work. As noted above,
several organizations report directly modeling the process, approach and critical elements from the AD
learning group in their own work - to build learning communities, convene networks, and scale their
impact.
2.3 Challenges
While participants strongly emphasized the positive impacts of the AD learning group, they also
recognized that challenges did arise that should be considered by anyone attempting to create a similar
type of community of practice in the future. While meeting regularly seemed to instill in participants a
sense of accountability, participants also indicated that being selected to be a part of the group brought
an accompanying sense of burden. For one younger leader, this burden of responsibility related to
feeling like they needed to be “further along” in their own development; in part, because they could
compare themselves to other strong leaders in the group and realized their career was at a different
stage. One participant described difficulties in applying the learning:
“Understanding how it all applied to what we were doing and then again, turning around and
being able to articulate that out, was just a huge challenge.”
Another participant expressed that the responsibility was associated with the fact that they perceived
that the McConnell Foundation was “risking a lot in investing in us”.
In some instances, the AD learning group changed over time because an organization had a transition in
leadership and a decision was made to include the new leader. For both the core AD learning
community and the new leader who joined the group late, the lack of continuity in relationships was
difficult. Expansion of the group size was also an issue. Early in the AD learning group, the group was
small, and participants referred to the small size as being critical to the development of the strong,
trusting bonds that formed. Later, when additional people were included, one participant reflected that
there was a “watered-down” sense of a shared learning experience. Yet, from the perspective of the
McConnell Foundation staff involved, keeping the group size small was challenging when new AD grants
were made and the new grantees would hear about the successful AD learning group and wonder why
they were not invited to join. Restricting participants risked a) upsetting grantees who believed they
were excluded or that the McConnell Foundation were “playing favourites”, and b) creating tension
between those organizations that were involved and those that were not involved, which could impact
partnerships or working relationships. This delicate balance needs to be considered as an important
element in any group learning process design. One participant reflected how using new forms of social
media could enable the content to be more widely shared, while still retaining a smaller learning
community.
It is interesting to note that a former participant who has applied the AD convening model is facing
similar challenges balancing growth and intimacy in their own situation:
We are at an interesting point, however, in our scale up process. We have gotten so big
(approximately 50 people attend our retreats) that maintaining the intimacy of a community
of practice has become challenging to maintain. We have begun to break the groups up
regionally and bring together smaller groups to ensure good discussion still happens.
There is most definitely a limit in size for the kind of group learning and support we find
most valuable.
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McConnell Foundation is currently experimenting with two scaling strategies for its learning
activities. It created an external program called Innoweave, which has the capacity to help
thousands of organizations learn about, assess, and implement new tools and approaches to
generate greater impact and advance their mission more quickly through on-line modules, in-
person workshops and subsidized coaching. It also has re-launched its convening of scaling
grantees, accommodating growing numbers by stepping out of the convenor role after 18 months
with plans to initiate new communities of practices with newly approved grantees.
2.4 Summary
Reflections on the design of the peer-based, experiential learning process established for the AD
learning group recognized the equal importance of the culture and environment, and the content. The
culture and environment, which was modeled by the McConnell Foundation staff from the beginning,
nurtured trusting relationships where the exploration of ideas and then ongoing experimentation and
learning was encouraged. Likewise, having content that drew on leading research on complexity,
resilience, and organizational theory helped to both frame new ideas and purposes, and to give
confidence to participants as they went forward into unchartered territory. Although a couple of
participants acknowledged that being surrounded by leaders in social and environmental organizations
increased pressure for them to perform and apply what they were learning, all agreed in the value of the
community of practice – to themselves as leaders, to their organization, and to their initiative. Perhaps
most importantly, the practitioners involved in the AD learning group grew comfortable with knowing
when to protect principles, people and projects, and when to let go, and be open to the emergent,
dynamic change that would inevitably follow, without fearing a loss of control.
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Conclusion:
We conclude with several observations. First, the practice of scaling in Canada has evolved from
earlier, simpler conceptions to a much more nuanced understanding. We have identified three types of
scaling associated with five associated strategies, as well as five cross-cutting strategies that supported
change leaders to expand the impact of their social solutions. These practitioners not only sought to
disseminate their innovations over wider geographic areas or to greater numbers, but aimed also at
systemic impacts - changes to rules, resource flows, cultural beliefs and relationships in a social system
at multiple spatial or institutional scales. The experience of Canadian practitioners can provide an
orienting map for the complex and often isolating journey of social innovation, suggesting that multiple
approaches to scaling may be needed to achieve systemic impacts.
Second, a critical part of the scaling process involved learning, through peer-based forums, from experts
who conducted research on social innovation and organizational change, from direct experience, and
through ongoing evaluation. But it was an important finding: the learning that the McConnell Foundation
stimulated in the AD community of practice became an embedded practice and essential part of scaling
innovation itself. Many participants also still draw on frameworks introduced, and rely on reference
material they collected from the sessions when thinking through difficult decisions or when training new
staff.
Third, by convening the AD learning group, the McConnell Foundation supported interconnectedness
among practitioners, and shifted its own practice. While these connections eventually developed into
long-term, trusting relationships that supported learning, they have also created the conditions for
emergence, whereby new ideas and new approaches for trying to make change happen in various social
and environmental issue areas could be fostered. Many participants remain committed to the
relationships developed during the AD learning group, and continue to serve as a resource and support
system for each other. Furthermore, the participants we interviewed hoped that they could be brought
together to support the next generation of socially innovative thinkers, recognizing that they have
experiences that they could share with others.
Fourth, designing and implementing a peer-based, experiential learning forum that drew upon experts at
specific times to provide new concepts and frameworks was recognized by all who participated as
extremely valuable. However, any foundation or organization considering leading the same type of
process should be aware that this was a resource-intensive exercise. It is difficult to achieve the level of
trust, openness, and support that was critical to the transformation of the individual participants, their
organization, and their initiative, without spending the time, energy, and financial resources to bring
people together in thoughtful and thought-provoking ways. While this resource-intensiveness raises
questions about the “scalability” of the impact of such learning processes, the experiences of a number
of participants who have gone on to embed peer-based learning in their own organizations and networks
demonstrates that the model can be scaled. Social technologies and advances in online learning
platforms are making scaling of peer networks and dissemination of knowledge much more available,
and while these do not replace the multiple benefits of face-to-face learning, they can complement and
support learning cohorts in ever-expanding ways. For example, much of the early learning material used
in Applied Dissemination has been systematized and advanced upon through the research from the
Waterloo Institute for Social Innovation and Resilience, hosted on the SiG Knowledge Hub
(www.sigknowledgehub.com). The McConnell Foundation’s Innoweave initiative offers an online platform
to support organizational learning through courses, coaching and small capacity grants
(www.innoweave.ca), including modules on scaling, developmental evaluation, and strategic clarity.
Finally, although the journey of social innovation is never complete, for there are always complex and
seemingly intractable problems to consider, this report ends on a note of celebration for successes and
for new beginnings. It is clear that applied learning did help to accelerate the impacts of several socially
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innovative initiatives across Canada. Now, these same practitioners, along with new generations of
change agents, are considering “what next” and continuing to push the boundaries of social change
practice. We look forward to discovering what the next generation of social innovation experiments in
Canada will bring.
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Appendix A
AD Participants involved in the study came from the following organizations:
Focus Groups:
Leena Augimeri, Director, Centre for Children Committing Offences at the Child Development Institute
and founder of SNAP (Stop Now and Plan) http://www.childdevelop.ca/programs/snap a violence-
prevention program that helps at-risk children manage angry feelings and prevent impulsive reactions.
Using a cognitive-behavioural approach, SNAP works with children and youth with conduct and related
behavioural problems, many of whom are at risk of interacting with the law. Its evidence-based approach
makes it one of the most highly regarded programs of its kind in the world.
Nathan Ball, past Executive Director, L’Arche Canada Foundation
The l'Arche http://www.larche.ca/ movement was started in France in 1964 by the well-known Canadian
theologian and scholar Jean Vanier. It is now international, with 145 communities on five continents, 29
of them in Canada. In these communities, young volunteer assistants live in homes with people with
intellectual disabilities for periods ranging from several months to two years or more.
Eleanor Beattie and Audrey Bean, Co-founders and Board members, L’Abri en Ville
http://www.labrienville.ca/ provides a stable and fulfilling environment for persons with a mental illness
through safe, affordable housing and inclusion in a supportive community. The l’Abri model has attracted
interested people in other regions who wished to create their own projects. L’Abri provides a combination
of information and accompaniment as these groups form.
Paul Born, Founder and President, Tamarack -- An Institute for Community Engagement
http://tamarackcommunity.ca/ develops and supports learning communities that help people to
collaborate, co-generate knowledge and achieve collective impact on complex community issues. Its
deep hope is to end poverty in Canada.
Vickie Cammack, Founder and past Executive Director, PLAN Institute http://institute.plan.ca/ provides
training, consultation, and research to groups and organizations in the citizen and public sectors, related
to “belonging”, caring citizenship and creating a good life for people with disabilities. Vickie Founder and
President and CEO of Tyze Personal Networks, a for-benefit corporation that creates online personal
networks and collaboration tools for people facing life challenges and their caregivers, friends, and
family.
Mary Gordon, Founder and President, Roots of Empathy http://www.rootsofempathy.org/
A classroom program, it has shown dramatic effects in reducing levels of aggression and violence
among schoolchildren while raising social emotional competence and increasing empathy. Each
classroom receives a monthly visit from a parent with a child under the age of one year, along with a
trained instructor. The class observes the child's development and uses the experiences of baby and
parent as a stimulus to exploring their own feelings, resulting in greater understanding of the feelings of
others.
Jennifer Johnson, Executive Director, CHSSN (Community Health & Social Services Network)
http://www.chssn.org/En/default.asp#&panel1-1 works to strengthen networks at the local, regional and
provincial level in Quebec in order to address health determinants, influence public policy and develop
services in collaboration with public partners. It now has more than 60 member organizations and is
involved with over 40 projects and partnerships in the areas of primary health care, community
development and population health.
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Scaling Out, Scaling Up, and Scaling Deep!
by Darcy Riddell and Michele-Lee Moore
Jane Rabinowicz, past Executive Director, Santropol Roulant http://santropolroulant.org/ a Montreal-
based organization bringing people together across generations and cultures through an innovative
meals-on-wheels service. Jane is currently the Program Director at USC Canada, working on food
security with small-holder farming communities within the global South.
Sherri Torjman, Vice-President, Caledon Institute of Social Policy http://www.caledoninst.org/ which
produces rigorous, high-quality research and analysis; seeks to inform and influence public opinion and
to foster public discussion on poverty and social policy; and develops and promotes concrete,
practicable proposals for the reform of social programs at all levels of government and of social benefits
provided by employers and the voluntary sector.
Focus groups also included the following J.W. McConnell Family Foundation representatives:
Stephen Huddart, President and CEO, The J. W. McConnell Family Foundation
Dana Vocisano, Senior Program Officer, The J. W. McConnell Family Foundation
Additional Survey Respondents:
Dave Kranenburg, past Executive Director, Meal Exchange a national, student-funded, youth-driven,
organization working to achieve a more secure and sustainable food system on campuses and with
communities across the country. Dave is currently the Director of Programs at the Centre for Social
Innovation.
John Mighton, Founder, JUMP Math https://jumpmath.org/cms/ which spreads the JUMP Math
method, an approach tailored to students struggling with math, especially those from low-income
families. JUMP believes that all children can be led to think mathematically, and that with even a modest
amount of attention every child will flourish.
George Roter, Co-founder and CEO, Engineers Without Borders http://www.ewb.ca/ a movement of
over 50,000 professional engineers, students, overseas volunteer staff, and supporters across Canada
that works to harness the skills and creativity of the Canadian engineering sector to find practical
solutions to extreme poverty in Africa.
