The Pursuit of Scale

This week, I had the pleasure of participating in LINGOs’ annual Global Learning Forum (#LINGOsForum) at Heifer International’s beautiful campus in Little Rock, Arkansas.  LINGOs ‘helps those who do good… do it better’ through learning programs and technologies and partnerships with companies such as Blackboard Collaborate, eCornell, and NetDimensions who generously make their products accessible to the international NGO community.  At the Forum, inspiring learning and development leaders from many NGOs and from World Bank, Philanthropy University, and sponsor Microsoft shared their experiences.

A central question addressed throughout the Forum was how to achieve massive scale in a rapidly changing world. LINGOs’ Chris Proulx put things in perspective.  Certain results (e.g. 10,000 NGO sector employees trained) appear to be significant.  However, when putting these results in a larger context (e.g. a total of 600,000+ NGO sector employees), we realize how much further we must reach.  By collaborating both within the NGO sector and with for-profit organizations we can find new ways of scaling our work.

The Bridgespan Group’s Jacquelyn Hadley introduced nine strategies for achieving transformative scale, which include leveraging technology, partnerships, and local distribution.  The starting point is to enlarge our thinking by continually returning to our organization’s purpose: what we are really trying to achieve.  At work, our attention can unnoticeably drift from the bigger goal to the day to day details of getting work done.  However, by returning our gaze to the greater purpose of our organizations, we can focus our efforts on the few most important activities that will get us closer to the end goal.

At a time when purpose is much talked and written about in the business world, and when impact and bottom-line results are interchangeable, these are themes that seem to have currency and relevance for professionals in both the non-profit and corporate sectors.