Glimpsing the Future: Nonscalability
New Ideas for Nonprofit Leaders
Image description: a close-up of the center of a sunflower, displaying an amazing spiraling pattern of seeds. Photo by Mathew Schwartz on Unsplash.
In my continuing search for insight about how to transform nonprofits and civil society, I am reading a wide variety of things. I’m finding challenging ideas that are compelling and difficult to fully comprehend and apply in my life and my consulting practice. I think of these as glimpses of what could be next, or elements on which to build a new understanding about how we can build a better society. I’m hungry for new insights, and thus willing to struggle to comprehend these ideas and look for patterns and opportunities to bring them together in my work. The main ideas we currently rely on feel inadequate, so I will continue to explore new approaches.
I recently discovered Anna Tsing’s new work on nonscalability. Her article, On Nonscalability: The Living World is Not Amenable to Precision-Nested Scales, is a bit academic, but so interesting (and there is a book as well, to really go deep). We all have work to do to unpack and unlearn capitalism and to see clearly the way it has shaped our lives, particularly our attitudes and expectations about work and worth. I find this article helpful, and to me, it relates to several trends in the nonprofit sector: the emphasis on productivity and measurement and the zeal for scaling up successful programs.
Tsing discusses how capitalism has focused on creating industries that standardize the elements of production to maximize production and profit. Factories and many other modern workplaces are modelled on the economic success of plantations, the original model for reducing plants (sugar cane), land (cleared and plowed), and people (enslaved) to interchangeable, predictable “nonsoels”—an abbreviation for “nonchangeable landscape elements.” These “nonsoels” are alienated from nature as a means of standardizing their performance. After outlining the rise of the scalable plantation and factory, she discusses the application of these principles to forestry in the Pacific Northwest. She notes that monocrop timber plantations are largely a failed experiment and that communities are left with “ruins” when scaled production fails and is abandoned. Into the ruins, nonscalability reasserts itself in interesting ways, as in the growth of matsusake mushrooms in the Eastern Cascades, a mushroom that cannot be cultivated and scaled but is highly prized.
Clearly, the scalable mode of operating has negative consequences. It reduces complex people and nature to alienated workers and cleared land. It is resource-intensive and dependent on endless growth and continued availability of cheap inputs. Relationships, diversity, and change undermine it and are not tolerated. Fortunately, she observes, “Scalability is never complete. If the world is still diverse and dynamic, it is because scalability never fulfills its own promises.” Perhaps those elements that are intentionally cleansed to create scalable projects are the ones we need to lift up to create something more natural and sustainable for our future.
Next post: How does Anna Tsing’s critique of scalability relate to nonprofits?