Hey Changemakers,
I want to talk about a specific slide. You’ve seen it. I’ve seen it. Heck, I’ve made it.
It’s the hockey stick graph. That beautiful swoop of growth, a glorious climb into the upper-right corner of the future where your org is large and resourced and presumably saving the world, efficiently and at scale. I’ve been in this sector nearly 40 years (GULP!), and I’ve looked at enough of these slides to win the IIHF World Championship. I’ve watched everyone in the room nod along, nobody ever asking whether the upper-right corner is actually the right destination.
So I’m asking now.
We Built This
Zack Petersen wrote a piece in the Stanford Social Innovation Review earlier this year, titled “Scale Is a Myth! Embrace the Long Defeat!,” that put language to something I’ve been circling for a while. He describes a founder at the Skoll Forum who feeds a donor the magic words—scale, RCT, AI—and walks away with a grant, knowing it’s all theater. The donor laps it up. The founder winks like an actress stepping offstage.
What stings is that Petersen’s sharpest observation isn’t about donors. It’s about us. Founders and CEOs are the ones selling the dream of scale. We know we could focus on our corner of the world and make it radically, irreversibly better, but we feel obligated to trot out the hockey stick, the huge numbers, the visions of national adoption. We quote cost-per-beneficiary numbers that, as Petersen puts it, look like they were calculated by an actuary with a drinking problem.
We’ve been pushing expansion as the ultimate goal because we think that’s what funders need to hear. But it doesn’t stay in the pitch meeting. That priority shapes our strategy, our leadership, and the work itself.
This isn’t a donor problem. It’s a doer problem. And it is exhausting.
The good news: We built this. Which means we can unbuild it.
Greatness Has Three Tests. Size Isn’t One of Them.
Jim Collins, whose Good to Great and the Social Sectors I have pressed into the hands of nearly every client I’ve worked with, defines greatness for social sector organizations with three tests: superior results, distinctive impact, and lasting endurance.
Read that list one more time.
Size is not on it. Budget is not on it. The number of zeros in the annual report is not on it.
In the social sectors, Collins argues, money is not a measure of greatness but merely an input. Greatness is a matter of conscious choice and discipline, available to any organization willing to pursue it.
That is a genuinely radical idea in a sector that loves leading with size. We just don’t treat it like one.
A Story I Heard in the Jungle
Last November, I traveled to the Peruvian Amazon to spend time with Minga Peru, a small, exceptional organization working with indigenous communities along the Marañón River. I came home with images and stories I’m still sorting through. One story really took hold.
During a cholera outbreak, the founder, then working as a public health worker, arrived in a remote community where people didn’t have clocks. The instruction to boil water for three minutes meant nothing. All the well-intentioned guidance, designed in Lima for someone else’s worldview, simply couldn’t land.
So she drew in the dirt. A pot. Bubbles. Ghosts rising from the steam. Boil the water until the ghosts leave.
The solution wasn’t scalable. But it was targeted. Ingenious. And it came from the discipline to ask what this community actually needed, and the humility to let the answer surprise her.
I think about that scene every time I sit across from an ED who is exhausted from chasing a growth strategy that doesn’t fit their community, their team, or, honestly, their mission.
What I’m Starting to See
Here is what gives me real hope: leaders making the conscious choice to say no to growth for growth’s sake.
Not because they’re giving up. Because they’re getting smarter. They’re asking better questions. Not “how do we scale?” but “what does our community need, and what is our specific role in that?” Not “how do we get bigger?” but “how do we grow our impact through a network, not just grow our institution?”
Petersen imagines this at the sector level: not one large organization chasing mythic scale, but a network of smaller, well-run organizations, each rooted, each competent, each fighting for the same thing from their particular place in the ecosystem. Leverage, he calls it. Scale on fire.
I’d call it the Collins trifecta, distributed.
The reproductive health organization that stops opening new clinics and instead trains 200 community health workers who already have the trust of the people they serve. The housing nonprofit that quietly hands its tenant advocacy model to a scrappier, younger organization in the next city over, because those folks know that block better than anyone ever could. The ED who looks at the strategic plan and asks: Are we chasing the next zero, or are we chasing superior results, distinctive impact, and lasting endurance?
That last question is worth sitting with.
—
The ghosts were never in the water. They were in the plan.
Time to draw in the dirt.
Kimberley
