What Scaling Practitioners Want INGO Leaders to Hear
By: Kate Gardner | Innovation consultant supporting WWF
With contributions from scaling leaders from the Innovation for Impact Network (IFIN)
The problems facing our planet are accelerating - biodiversity loss, climate change, food insecurity, displacement. Across environmental and humanitarian organisations, the response has been a growing ambition to work "at scale." The language is everywhere: scale strategies, scale pathways, scaling impact.
But among the practitioners tasked with making that ambition operational; the people designing scale pathways, building partnerships, and navigating the reality of taking solutions beyond pilot; there is a consistent concern. Not that the ambition is wrong, but that what "working at scale" actually requires is not yet well enough understood or actioned upon by the leaders pursuing scaled outcomes. There is a gap between the aspiration of scale and the operational, structural, and strategic changes needed to deliver on it - many of which sit in territory that leadership directly controls: organisational structure, hiring, strategy, work allocation, decision-making authority, and how success is defined.
The following 5 themes present an honest account of what the people closest to the scaling work see, and what they want leadership to consider before walking into conversations about impact at scale, drawing on insights from scaling practitioners across a number of INGOs
1. Impactfulness is not the same as scalability
“Leaders consistently underestimate that scaling is a doing problem, not a thinking problem. A compelling strategy document is not a scaling plan. A successful pilot is not proof of scale. What scaling actually requires is focused, dedicated delivery — not handed off to already-stretched colleagues as an add-on to their existing jobs.”
Jessica Lybeck, Director, Scale Facility, The Nature Conservancy
Organisations working in conservation and humanitarian response have deep technical expertise. They know how to deliver impact. What is less well understood is that just because something has proven impactful in the pilot phase, does not mean that it is inherently scalable. A pilot demonstrates that a model works in a specific context, with a specific team, under specific conditions. It tells you almost nothing about whether that model can travel, be adopted by others, or function without the organisation that built it.
The skills required to build something scalable are distinct from the skills that made it impactful. Technical teams doing grant-funded direct delivery are often not best positioned to figure out how to scale a solution.
That requires dedicated capacity, dedicated resources, and potentially a distinct team with scale capability. It also requires rethinking how early success is measured — testing for scalable delivery models, not only technical impact.
2. Scale is a decade-long commitment, not a project cycle
“If leaders truly want to scale work, they need to dismantle matrixed teams. Make one person accountable for one outcome — with the authority to protect their team's time and the funding flexibility to move at the speed the objective demands. Right now, we design for shared ownership, which is really just distributed inaction.”
Jessica Lybeck, Director, Scale Facility, The Nature Conservancy
The evidence base on scaling is clear: meaningful scale takes time. Prior literature consistently cites timelines of fifteen to twenty years. Even recent synthesis work from the Scaling Community of Practice reports that the scaling journey takes around ten years at best.
Yet most organisations fund and plan for scaling within three- to five-year grant cycles — which means initiatives build momentum, demonstrate early promise, and then lose funding, focus, or key staff long before they reach the point where scale becomes self-sustaining.
The structural problem runs deeper than funding timelines. In many organisations, scaling work sits within matrixed teams where individuals are spread across multiple projects and priorities. No single person has dedicated, full-time focus on making any one initiative scale. The result is that the sustained attention scaling demands — the continuous pivoting, assumption-testing, stakeholder engagement, and adaptive management — competes with everything else on everyone's plate. And everything else usually wins.
This is compounded when decision-making authority and resources are held centrally rather than where the scaling work actually happens.
“So much momentum is lost because Country Offices depend on fragmented grants and HQ-level approvals, even though they're the ones with the proximity, partnerships, and insight to steer scale pathways. When we enable predictable funding, decision-making power together with centralised support to look outside the country context — we have higher chances of impact.”
Emma-Lee Knape, Head of IGNITE Innovation Hub, World Food Programme
3. Scale happens at the systems level
When organisations talk about scale, they often mean doing more of what they already do - reaching more people, expanding to more geographies, replicating a programme model. But practitioners working on scale consistently describe a different ambition. Meaningful scale is not about organisational expansion. It is about systems-level change.
This has two dimensions worth being explicit about:
Working within the system.
No single organisation scales impact alone. Scale happens when multiple actors (governments, local institutions, civil society, the private sector) are aligned around a shared solution and are actively contributing to its adoption. The INGO’s role should not be the central implementer who brings in partners when all the design and thinking has been done. It is to work as one actor within a broader system, contributing what it does best while enabling others to carry the work forward.
Shifting systems norms.
Replication has a role to play. But if the underlying systems that perpetuate a problem remain unchanged, replication alone will never match the scale of the challenge. Durable scale often requires shifting the conditions that create the problem: through policy change, market transformation, institutional reform, or changes in social norms. This is slower, harder to measure, and harder to fund. It is also where the most lasting impact tends to be found.
4. From implementer to orchestrator
If scale happens at the systems level, the question for any large INGO becomes: what role do we need to play? For most, the answer requires a shift from being the organisation that delivers impact, to being the one that enables others to deliver impact at scale
“That transition from 'we can do this' to 'others can do and fund this without us' is where scaled impact lives. And it almost never happens inside a single organization, no matter how large.”
Jessica Lybeck, Director, Scale Facility, The Nature Conservancy
Scaling has only truly happened when other actors are adopting, implementing, and paying for the solution.. This means building for handoff from the start - embedding local ownership and exit planning into the earliest stages, not treating them as something to figure out later.
It means accepting that the organisation's long-term value lies not in its continued presence but in shifting its role to one that builds the conditions for others to lead.
5. What needs to stop
The preceding sections describe what scaling requires; this section names what gets in the way. These are patterns identified independently by practitioners across multiple organisations.
Stop chasing novelty. There is a persistent institutional bias toward the new — this keeps organisations stuck in perpetual pilot mode. Take what works, add the right skill sets, adjust the model for scalability, and give it the sustained attention and resources it needs.
“When leaders reward novelty and visibility instead of adoption and system change, teams get stuck in pilot churn instead of building mature, scalable models.”
Emma-Lee Knape, World Food Programme
Stop saying yes to everything, and calling it strategy. An organisation that pursues every opportunity is an organisation that has decided not to scale anything. Real strategy is when you stop doing less impactful work in service of scaling the most important work.
Stop funding your own continuity instead of the work. The most honest question leadership is faced with is: are we funding what needs to happen for the planet, or are we funding keeping the lights on? When core operating costs consistently crowd out the resourcing of high-priority work, that is a values decision - whether or not it is framed as one.
Provocations for INGO Leadership
The gap between scaling ambition and scaling reality is not caused by a lack of good intentions or smart people. It is caused by structures, incentives, and habits designed for a different kind of work. Closing that gap requires leaders to examine not only what their organisations do, but how they are set up to do it.
Scaling is not a technical issue. It is an organisational and financial one. The financial dimensions — long-term funding, flexible resources, sustainable financing — are familiar territory for leadership conversations. The organisational dimensions are not. And that is where the most important questions lie:
How is your organisation getting in its own way? What structures, approval processes, or incentives are actively slowing down the scaling work you have declared a priority?
Are you hiring for scalability, or for technical skills? If every new technical hire strengthens your capacity to develop great strategy, but none strengthens your capacity to implement, enable others, or let the work go, your organisation is building itself further into a model it cannot sustain at scale.
Are your teams designing for handoff, or for continuity? If your solutions require your permanent presence, they are not yet scalable. And if your funding model depends on that permanent presence, you may be funding your own continuity rather than the true impact potential.
If your organisation stopped all direct implementation tomorrow, what would continue without you? That is your actual scaled impact.
These are not simple questions with easy answers. But they are the questions practitioners would like to see leadership taking action on.
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