View source for Scaling Up vs. Scaling Across

=Discussion=

Deborah Frieze:

"Modern winemakers have learned to embrace the notion of scaling across: the movement around the world of winemaking practices and techniques that have preserved deep reverence for the uniqueness of place, for the gift of terroir that today has generated bountiful flavors, styles, and vintages on five continents.

But respect for the invisible forces of place — to which we could add its social and cultural heritage — is hardly conventional wisdom when it comes to taking things to scale. More often, in fact, we find ourselves confronted with the suppression of the local — consider the uniformity of any Starbucks, McDonald’s, or Wal-Mart. From Seattle to Singapore, we homogenize culture by subsuming local flavor through standardization and replication. This is what scaling up is about: We patent a product, standardize a process, franchise a formula. 

...

caling up creates a monoculture that relies on replication, standardization, promotion, and compliance. It’s easy to make the case for this strategy in the context of consumer culture. Businesses all over the world encourage people to consume their beverages, buy their merchandise, watch their movies. Despite the fact that community is inherently local, most people engaged in community change nonetheless aspire to follow in the footsteps of big business by scaling up, expanding programs, and rolling out offices in new geographies. They pursue the coveted strategy of disseminating best practices, which holds that what has been invented and perfected in one place can be parachuted or transplanted into another. This view assumes that organizations are machines, and to improve them, we just need to swap out the old parts for new and improved ones, or install new software. In other words, conventional wisdom tells us to use the same irrigation, measure out the same slant of hillside, and plonk down our grapes. And then somehow we’re surprised when the wine tastes bad.

Fortunately, community is nothing like a machine, and citizens rarely surrender their autonomy to the experts’ advice. In fact, it only takes a little bit of digging to discover that even in corporations, exchanging best practices often doesn’t work. What does work is when teams from one organization travel to another and, through that experience, see themselves more clearly, strengthen their relationships, and renew their creativity. Like a Learning Journey, these are the visits that disrupt our old ways of seeing and widen our view of what’s possible.

'''Scaling across happens when people create something locally and inspire others who carry the idea home and develop it in their own unique way'''."

(https://medium.com/in-praise-of-scaling-down/from-scaling-up-to-scaling-across-ed5092acd22f)

[[Category:P2P_Hierarchy_Theory]]