This is the third essay in a series on why the social sector needs a theory of scale. Start with the first essay here.

In early 2024, Hadden Turner penned a popular essay that argued our local places should be the center of our attention. He described the “burden of world saving” as a crippling and intolerable expectation that shouldn’t be placed on any one person, or any one organization. Turner reminded us that no graduation ceremony is complete without the standard trope from the vice-chancellor: go out, make us proud, and change the world. Better, Turner argued, to be famous within fifteen miles.

This is the sentiment I try to bring to my social entrepreneurship course every fall. Not a charge to change the world but an invitation to take a particular place seriously, to learn its limits, and to do good work within them. The temptation my students arrive with is the one Turner names exactly: that the worthiest endeavor is the biggest one, that scale is the measure of seriousness, that staying small is a failure of ambition. I have a semester to make the opposite case before their imaginations get the best of them.

I do not start with theory. I start with a local pizza shop. The questions the owner of a local pizza shop has to answer are the ones anyone running an honest enterprise confronts the moment they think about selling more pizzas. How many more can you make before the next one costs more than the last? How many can your kitchen, your staff, and your neighborhood actually sustain? What happens to the quality when you start measuring success by how many you sold rather than how good they were?

In preparing for the course project, I want my students to wrestle with these questions just as the pizza shop owner must. I also want them to think about how change happens, how the work gets paid for, and what proper scale looks like. Fortunately, there are plenty of resources available for answering the first two. The third is woefully absent from our sector discourse.

Returns to Scale

Before the local pizza shop makes any decision about growth, the owner has to understand what kind of return they can expect from it. Economists call this returns to scale, and a savvy owner does not assume they can sell an endless number of pizzas. Every operation has limits, and pretending otherwise is the surest way to run the enterprise into the ground. There are three stages, and the shop is always in one of them.

In increasing returns, each additional pizza is almost pure profit because the kitchen, the oven, and the staff are already paid for. This is the phase every owner remembers fondly, and the one most consultants assume their clients are still in. In constant returns, each pizza produces roughly the same as the last; growth continues but stops accelerating. In diminishing returns, each additional pizza costs more to produce than the one before it. The oven slows down. The dough suffers under volume. Push far enough and the additional pizzas actively damage the enterprise, burning out the staff, frustrating the regulars, and eroding the reputation that built the business.

Wendell Berry put the underlying problem plainly. Not knowing when to stop, he argued, is what drives industrial growth, and the clearest sign of it is the gap between how big our enterprises become and how little the things that sustain them can actually bear. The pizza shop owner and the social entrepreneur share the same responsibility, even if the consequences arrive faster for one. Both have to know which stage the enterprise is in before deciding anything about growth.1

Carrying Capacity

Berry tells a story about lynxes. When lynxes eat too many snowshoe rabbits, the population starves until it falls back to what the habitat can support. The point he draws from it is the one worth holding onto: it is the carrying capacity of the lynx’s habitat, not the carrying capacity of the lynx’s stomach, that determines whether lynxes thrive. The appetite of the animal is not what matters. The habitat is.

The pizza shop owner understands this without needing the language. Their ambition is not what determines whether the shop succeeds. The neighborhood determines it: the families within walking distance who want pizza on a Friday night, the suppliers who can deliver reliably, the staff who live close enough to show up. The owner can want to sell a thousand pizzas a week, but if the habitat can only sustain three hundred, the wanting is irrelevant. Push past what the neighborhood can hold and the shop does not grow. It shrinks back to what the habitat could support all along, with the difference paid out in burned-out staff and a reputation that takes years to rebuild.

The same is true of the social enterprise. The organization’s appetite for more donors, or more program sites, is the same fantasy as the owner’s appetite for more customers. How many new donors the organization wants, or how many new communities it hopes to reach, is not what determines whether the work can actually be done there. The habitat determines it: the community’s values, the trust the organization has accumulated, the history of relationships that make a donor want to stay rather than churn and make a program take root rather than wither. Push past what that habitat can sustain and the organization does not produce ten thousand engaged donors or a dozen thriving sites. It shrinks back to whatever the habitat was willing to support, with the list burned, the new sites hollow, and the trust spent faster than it can be replenished.

Drift to Low Performance

The third question is the hardest, because it is about the decision maker rather than their operation. What happens to the standard over time when the gap between what the shop promised and what it can deliver starts to widen? The pizzas are still selling. The numbers are still acceptable. But the dough is not quite what it was. The owner notices, and decides whether to defend the standard or quietly let it slip to match what the operation can sustain.

Systems thinkers call this drift to low performance. When the work falls short of the standard of care it requires, there are two ways to close the gap. You can maintain the quality of the work, or you can lower the standard. When scale is the only standard we are truly committed to, the others are tossed out the window. The erosion happens incrementally, each concession reasonable in isolation, until the work has deteriorated badly and the original standard has been forgotten.

This is true of the pizza shop and the social enterprise alike. The owner fixated on selling more pizzas stops noticing the dough. The social entrepreneur fixated on reach stops noticing that the program is thinner, the relationships shallower, the work less likely to change anyone. In both cases the numbers go up, the footprint gets bigger, the deck looks impressive. What gets delivered is worse, but hey, we’re scaling. The difference is only one of time. The pizza shop that drifts this way is out of business by spring. The organization that does it can keep going for years, producing less and less of what it was built to produce, because scale is the only thing it is still measuring.

The Call

Returns to scale, carrying capacity, and drift to low performance are not obstacles to ambition. They are the practical answer to the question Turner raised at the outset: how does one unburden themselves of world saving? You do it by knowing which stage your enterprise is in, what your habitat can actually sustain, and whether your standards are holding or quietly eroding. These are the questions any honest pizza shop owner answers before considering growth, and they are the questions the social sector should expect from anyone proposing scale. The indictment of the scale pitch is that it speaks to none of them, and pretends they do not apply.

If this argument resonates, share it with a colleague who has heard the pitch one too many times. The next essay takes up the hardest case of all: the promise, made by industrialism’s apologists, that relationships can finally scale. They can’t, and the reasons matter.

- , Partner & Chief Innovation Officer at Seed

This is the second essay in a series on why the social sector needs a theory of scale. Start with the first essay here.

This week, Oxford is hosting its annual gathering of the sector's most influential voices, and the word "scale" will be spoken more times than anyone will bother to count. Skoll brings together the founders, funders, and consultants who shape how the social sector understands its own ambitions, and it does so in a setting that has a way of making the sector's most durable myths feel like settled wisdom. A recent piece by Zack Petersen in the Stanford Social Innovation Review named it honestly: the magic words are AI, RCT, and scale, and as he puts it, everyone knows it's theater. This essay wants to go one level deeper than Petersen's argument. The problem is not only that scale is a myth the sector performs. It is that scale and transformation cannot coexist, and transformation is what the sector exists to produce.

What Tsing Actually Says

Anna Tsing is an anthropologist whose work on global capitalism has earned her a serious following well outside her own discipline. Her argument about scalability, developed most fully in The Mushroom at the End of the World, is not about the social sector. It is about the logic of capital, and how that logic has come to organize the way modern institutions think about growth, replication, and value. But her argument travels, and it travels directly into the room where the Skoll conversations are happening. Tsing defines scalability as the ability to expand without changing the nature of the project, and argues that this is only possible if project elements do not form transformative relationships. Those relationships, she contends, are the very conditions from which meaningful diversity emerges, diversity that might change things. A sector whose entire purpose is to change things should find that argument unsettling.

Tsing’s argument does not say that scaling is difficult or that it often fails in practice, though both of those things are also true. It says that scaling requires, as a precondition, the removal of the very conditions that made something worth replicating in the first place. The organization that developed an effective approach to community health in a specific neighborhood did so because it was embedded in that neighborhood, because its staff knew the families, because its relationships had history and texture and obligation built into them over time. Those conditions are not incidental to the effectiveness of the work. They are constitutive of it. And they are precisely what a scaling operation must eliminate before the model can travel.

The social sector has largely absorbed the language of scaling without absorbing this implication. When a consultant proposes to scale a program, the conversation moves immediately to systems, staffing, and resources. What gets removed in the process of standardization is treated as an implementation detail rather than a foundational question. Tsing’s argument suggests it is the foundational question, and that a sector serious about its own effectiveness would treat it as such before any other conversation about growth begins.

What the Sector Actually Does

The masters of scale in our modern economy are not hard to identify. Amazon, McDonald’s, and Walmart have each achieved something genuinely impressive: the elimination of meaningful variation across contexts. You can walk into a McDonald’s in Tokyo or Toledo and receive an identical product, because every variable that might introduce difference has been engineered out of the process. That is what scale actually requires. It is not growth. It is standardization so complete that the particular place, the particular person, and the particular relationship become irrelevant to the outcome. Nobody walks out of a McDonald’s transformed by the encounter. That is precisely the point, and it is precisely the problem when the same logic is applied to the social sector.

The social sector exists to change things. It exists to change lives, change conditions, change communities, and change systems. Transformation is not a byproduct of the work. It is the work. Karl Polanyi’s insight is useful here: the market economy required the deliberate disembedding of economic activity from the social relations in which it had always been embedded, converting particular relationships into standardized transactions. The social sector works in the opposite direction. Its effectiveness depends on embeddedness, on being rooted in specific communities, specific relationships, and specific histories of obligation and trust. When it disembeds in order to scale, it is not growing. It is converting itself into something that operates by market logic while retaining the language of mission.

These are not abstract theoretical concerns. They describe something that practitioners in the social sector recognize from experience even when they lack the language to name it. The organization rooted in a specific community over decades does work that a replicated model cannot do, not because it is better managed, but because it has accumulated the relational conditions that make transformation possible. The program that works in one neighborhood works because it is of that neighborhood, because the people delivering it are known and trusted, because the relationships it depends on have been built over time through encounter and obligation. Scale those conditions out and you do not have more transformation. You have a franchise selling cheeseburgers.

The Limit Case

If Tsing is right that transformation is the enemy of standardization, and if our interpretation of Polanyi is right that the social sector’s effectiveness depends on precisely the kind of embeddedness that scaling eliminates, then the conclusion is difficult to avoid. A sector that exists to produce transformation cannot scale without undermining its own purpose. This is not nostalgia for small organizations or a concession that large problems are beyond the sector’s reach. It is a clarification of categories. Transformation and standardization operate by different logics, and the sector has been trying to pursue both for long enough that the contradiction has become invisible. A theory of scale would make it visible again.

The sector will resist this conclusion because it threatens premises on which a significant portion of its infrastructure rests, and not just its fundraising machinery. Program design, evaluation frameworks, replication grants, capacity building initiatives: all of these can be premised on the idea that the conditions of transformation can be systematized and replicated without loss. Petersen arrives at the right conclusion from the wrong direction. He observes that scale fails in practice and concludes the sector should stop chasing it. The theoretical argument says he is right about the observation but the reason runs deeper than failure. Scale does not just fail to deliver transformation. It is structurally incompatible with it. That is a stronger endorsement of his instinct than he gave himself, and it points toward a more fundamental reckoning than the sector has yet been willing to have.

This has consequences for how the sector measures, rewards, and supports its own work. If proximity, encounter, and obligation are conditions of transformation rather than its decorative features, then the organizations most faithfully cultivating those conditions are precisely the ones the sector’s architecture is least equipped to support. They are too small, too rooted, too particular, too resistant to standardization that the sector has been trained to reward. The question that follows from this essay, and that the next essay in this series will begin to examine, is what it would mean to build a sector architecture serious enough to ask: what exactly are we scaling, and at what cost to the conditions that make transformation possible in the first place?

The Call

Tsing’s argument about scalability is not a niche academic concern. It is a description of something the social sector’s most experienced practitioners already know from the inside, that the work that matters most is almost always the work that resists standardization, that the organizations doing it well are doing it well precisely because they have stayed close, stayed particular, and stayed obligated to specific people in specific places. Polanyi gives that intuition a theoretical foundation. The sector embeds itself in communities by nature and disembeds by force, and the pressure to scale has been applying that force, largely without acknowledgment, for a long time. A theory of scale would not reverse that process on its own. But it would at least require the sector to name what it is doing before it does it.

If this argument resonates, share it with a colleague who has sat in those Oxford rooms, or with a funder who has asked the scale question without waiting for the answer. This is the second in a series of essays that will work through what a genuine theory of scale might look like in practice. Comment with what you are seeing in your own context, push back where the argument needs pressure, and pass it along to someone who would rather ask better questions than nod along at the next deck.

- , Partner & Chief Innovation Officer at Seed

There is a phrase that has become so embedded in the vocabulary of the social sector that it no longer registers as a claim requiring defense. “At scale” arrives at the end of promises made by consulting firms, technology vendors, and institutional funders alike, functioning less as a description of what is being offered than as a signal of ambition and sophistication. None of them, as far as the evidence suggests, have developed a particularly rigorous account of what the phrase actually means, what it costs, or whether the thing being scaled survives the process. That gap is worth taking seriously. When any actor in the social sector suggests that something can and should be done at scale, the claim should prompt a pause and a request for explanation, not an enthusiastic nod of approval.

The Phrase and What It Signals

“At scale” is never hard to find. It rides on the back of nearly every promise a consulting firm or technology vendor makes to a nonprofit leader: we can grow your donor base at scale, deliver your program at scale, transform your fundraising at scale. Institutional funders have their own version of the same impulse, increasingly directing resources toward organizations that demonstrate the potential to replicate their models across geographies and populations. The merger and consolidation arguments that have grown louder in the sector over the last year are its structural expression, the logical conclusion of a premise that treats organizational size as a proxy for effectiveness and redundancy as a form of waste. Scale, in each of these contexts, is not presented as a choice with tradeoffs but as a destination that serious organizations are expected to want to reach.

What makes this remarkable is the contrast with how the sector treats almost every other significant concept in its vocabulary. Donor-centrism has been examined and found wanting by a growing number of practitioners. Overhead ratios have been exposed as a poor proxy for organizational effectiveness. Trust-based philanthropy has mounted a serious challenge to the power dynamics embedded in conventional grantmaking, and has earned genuine traction among funders willing to examine their own assumptions. The sector has developed, slowly and unevenly, a capacity for self-examination that was largely absent a generation ago. Scale has escaped this scrutiny almost entirely. It moves through the sector’s conversations not as a claim that needs defending but as the backdrop against which every other claim is made, the assumed destination toward which all serious work is pointed.

The consulting class that serves this sector is arguably the primary carrier of the assumption, though it did not invent it. These are firms that have imported their operating premises wholesale from Silicon Valley, where scale is not merely a goal but the definitive measure of whether something matters. Systematization, replication, efficiency, data-driven decision making: the toolkit travels well, and the sector has largely accepted it without asking whether the problems it was designed to solve bear any resemblance to the ones the social sector actually faces. Tellingly, the consulting class will challenge a great deal. They will question your fundraising model, your board composition, your theory of change, your organizational culture. What many will not question, because it is the premise on which their entire value proposition rests, is whether scale is the right goal in the first place.

The Theory of Change Parallel

The social sector does have a model for what serious interrogation of unexamined virtues and inherited assumptions looks like, and it is worth examining before making the case for what a theory of scale would need to contain. The theory of change, for all its limitations, represents a genuine intellectual achievement in the sector’s development. It introduced the expectation that organizations articulate, in advance and with some rigor, the logic by which their work produces the outcomes they are claiming. It forced a reckoning with causality that had largely been absent from how nonprofits described and evaluated their own work. The question it asks, how does this intervention actually produce the outcome you are claiming, is simple enough to appear obvious and demanding enough to expose a remarkable amount of wishful thinking when applied consistently.

The theory of change does not arrive fully formed or universally embraced. It gets resisted, diluted, and in many cases reduced to a compliance exercise that preserves the form while abandoning the substance. Many practitioners still cannot define it with any precision, and a significant number of organizations produce theory of change documents that describe organizational activities rather than those contributions that effectively bring about the desired effects. But the concept has nonetheless earned a kind of legitimacy that has changed the sector’s expectations. Funders require it. Evaluators use it as a framework. Practitioners begin, however unevenly, to internalize the habit of asking how rather than simply asserting that. That is a meaningful shift, and it did not happen because the concept was perfect. It happened because the question it insisted on asking was the right one.

Scale has not been subjected to anything resembling that discipline. It arrives in the sector’s conversations carrying the assumption that the goal is self-evident and the only remaining questions are operational. How fast can we grow? What systems do we need to support that growth? What resources will it require? These are not unimportant questions, but they are downstream of a couple other questions that almost never get asked: what exactly are we scaling, and what does the process of scaling require us to give up? A theory of scale, modeled on the theory of change’s insistence on logic and context, would begin there, before the systems conversation, before the resource conversation, before the replication conversation. It would treat scale not as a destination but as a claim requiring the same scrutiny the sector has learned, unevenly but genuinely, to apply to everything else.

The Concepts Nobody Brings

There is a useful thought experiment for anyone who has sat across from a consulting firm or technology vendor making promises at scale. Ask them about diminishing returns. The concept is not obscure. It is taught in introductory economics courses and understood by anyone who has managed a budget or run a program long enough to watch the marginal value of additional investment begin to decline. Applied to scale, it raises a straightforward question: at what point does the addition of more donors, more geographies, more program sites, or more staff produce less rather than more of the outcome you are seeking? The question is rarely asked because the growth imperative makes it feel defeatist. But diminishing returns is not a counsel of despair. It is a description of reality that any serious theory of scale would need to account for from the outset.

Ask them about carrying capacity. The concept comes from ecology, where it describes the maximum population a given environment can sustain without degrading the conditions that make that population possible. It translates directly to organizational life. Every organization has a carrying capacity, a point beyond which additional growth begins to consume the relational, cultural, and operational conditions that made the organization effective in the first place. As noted earlier, the merger and consolidation arguments that have gained traction recently rarely engage with this question seriously. They treat organizational distinctiveness as redundancy and community rootedness as inefficiency, without asking whether the thing they are consolidating will survive the process of consolidation intact.

Ask them, finally, about Dunbar’s number. This one will not appear in an economics textbook. Robin Dunbar’s research suggests that the human capacity for stable, meaningful relationships has a ceiling, somewhere in the vicinity of 150 people, with genuine intimacy reserved for a much smaller circle within that. No amount of data, technology, or systematization moves that number. What the sector calls scaling relationships is, in practice, the scaling of relationship-like communications, more personalized emails, more segmented appeals, more data-informed touchpoints. These are not without value, but they produce a semblance of authenticity rather than the thing itself, and no amount of technological sophistication closes that gap. A theory of scale would require that distinction to be named before any promise about deepening donor relationships at scale is allowed to stand unchallenged.

The Call

The social sector has demonstrated that it can develop the intellectual infrastructure to interrogate its own assumptions. The theory of change is evidence of that capacity. What the sector has not yet done is apply that same capacity to scale, the concept that sits closest to the center of how its most influential actors think about effectiveness and ambition. A theory of scale would not be an argument against growth. It would be an argument for honesty about what growth costs, what it requires, and where its limits lie. Diminishing returns, carrying capacity, and Dunbar’s number are not reasons to stay small. They are reasons to ask better questions before getting bigger. The consulting firms, technology vendors, and institutional funders who traffic in the promise of scale are not going away. But the sector can decide to hold them to a higher standard of explanation, and that decision begins with recognizing that “at scale” is not a destination. It is the essence of an important question that is rarely asked.

If this argument resonates, share it with a colleague who has sat across from that pitch, or with a funder who has made it. This is the first in a series of essays that will work through what a genuine theory of scale might look like in practice. Comment with what you are seeing in your own context, push back where the argument needs pressure, and pass it along to someone who would rather ask better questions than nod along at the next deck.

- , Partner & Chief Innovation Officer at Seed