I was on my way to meet Sheherazade for a meeting with a client yesterday and thinking about how to frame my section of our interim report when I thought of Frank Gehry. A few years ago I went to an exhibit at the Guggenheim that featured his work and what fascinated me at the time was that his creative process did not start with the building, but with understanding the space and flow of the project. His early stage drawings, starting with squiggles on a cocktail napkin or random pieces of paper, were about the energy and nature of the space itself; and even after he started to design the structure, his spacial thinking would run parallel, merging finally with the design. What made me think of this is because, in our small way, that is how Sheherazade and I approach our work. Long before we produce the ultimate product we spend considerable time understanding the nature of what we are working with, what ‘flow’ looks like, what ideas underpin the project, and what matters to the people involved. In this case, the task is to build an evaluation framework for the funders of a national scale-up of a successful local project. So one of the questions we’ve been asking ourselves as we mull around in the project’s ’space’ is, what is scale-up? Is it replication? Is it a community of practice? Is it social innovation? Is there a difference between those? Does that matter? We reviewed the literature, we talked to stakeholders, and we realized that yes, those are very different concepts, and yes, it does matter. We ultimately settled on two models that capture the essential differences, one which we call replication and and the other (for lack of a better term) ‘knowledge transfer’.
We defined replication as a program or project that duplicates the values, objectives, form, standards and outcomes of an existing program in a different location or context, and knowledge transfer as a project or program that uses and adapts the knowledge and ideas from the original program to achieve the same impact or outcome. We wanted to show when either model would work best, how to use them and the implications of each for evaluation. Clearly there is a role for replication which is more prescriptive, as there is for knowledge transfer, which is more interpretive. But our point to our client is that although it’s not impossible to have a hybrid, there is a danger in misaligning intent and action or in sending mixed messages to constituents. In this case, only a minor shift in thinking was required, but we have seen funders who want to encourage innovation and adaptation of best practices, but have funding guidelines that reward adherence to a particular form and process.
We think this chart might be helpful to those of you who are considering scaling-up a project and who might be unsure about the appropriate strategy. It will help you think through your objectives and the characteristics of the project you are looking to expand and then develop a strategy that will ensure you are aligned and consistent.
In a future blog, we will share a new logic model format we developed to support scale-ups using the knowledge transfer model. But let us know what you think of this chart and whether you can suggest improvements. And of course, feel free to use it however you wish.
Some resources we found helpful:
“Going to Scale: The Challenge of Replicating Social Programs” by Jeffrey Bradach in the Stanford Social Innovation Review
A Summary of Lessons from Applied Dissemination Grants, The J. W. McConnell Family Foundation
“How can social innovations be sustained? The J. W. McConnell Family Foundation
“Fielding Large-Scale Community Change Initiatives: Key Lessons from a Decade of Systems Change”. The Urban Seminar Series on Children’s Health and Safety, Harvard University
“Scaling Up – A Conceptual and operational Framework: A preliminary report to the MacArthur Foundation’s Program on Population and Reproductive Health” Richard Kohl and Lawrence Cooley (This will take you to the Tamarack web site, take some time to look around at their interesting work.)
Check out this blog by Social Edge on scale. Oddly, you have to read it backwards, but it has a lot of good ideas.
Hello from Russia!
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