Scaling Up Development Impact: An Interview with Author Isabel Guerrero

Despite significant strides in development, many big challenges loom large. The UN Sustainable Development Goals have outlined some of these challenges to overcome by 2030. Against this backdrop, understanding scale is mission-critical to achieve these ambitious goals. Scaling Up Development Impact, a new book we co-authored with Isabel Guerrero, delves into concepts and real-life examples of how to think about and approach scaling up.

We first met Isabel as master’s students at the Harvard Kennedy School (HKS), where we learned about her personal journey. Her ideas of how to do development differently deeply resonated with us. After closely working together at Imago Global Grassroots for two years, we teamed up to write this book, blending her experiences and insights with our work. We recently sat down with Isabel for an interview to explore the book's main ideas.

Isabel is a lecturer at HKS and a current research fellow at the Harvard Center for International Development. She has been teaching a course on scaling up to HKS students for the last decade. She is the co-founder and director of Imago Global Grassroots, an organization that helps grassroots organizations around the world scale their impact. Previously, Isabel worked at the World Bank for most of her professional life, culminating in her role as the Vice President for South Asia, where she managed a portfolio of 39 billion dollars. She is an economist and psychoanalyst by training.

Q: What was the motivation for writing this book?

The inspiration to work on this book came from SEWA (the Self-Employed Women’s Association), whose Gandhian movement to organize millions of informal women workers in India moved me to research and understand scaling impact. I wanted to learn what the main pathways and challenges for an organization to scale are, and designed a course from scratch in 2014 for HKS. The inspiration for the book came years later when I had taught the course for almost a decade and used the framework to work with many organizations, which helped adapt, iterate and enrich the teaching in class.

While working at scale at the World Bank, I realized that multilateral organizations, aid agencies, and governments, typically backed by development ‘experts,’ too often fail to reach the most vulnerable. They provide top-down solutions and are too large to be nimble and adaptive, especially in complex areas such as last mile delivery. At the same time, while living in Bolivia, Peru , Mexico and India, I met extraordinary local organizations that had the solutions to many problems that could not be solved from the top-down, but also struggled to scale.

Trying to understand what it would take to scale up was the seed that grew into Imago Global Grassroots, with a vision to amplify grassroots solutions to a global scale and a mission to rethink how we approach poverty alleviation, where the people in need are not recipients of aid but agents of change. It prompted me to teach a scaling-up course at HKS. Our work at Imago and the HKS course over the past decade forms the basis of this book. The aim is to start a conversation around scaling up, offer an alternate vision of development, and provide practitioners with guiding questions as they embark on their own scaling journey.

Q: Why have so few solutions scaled, and what makes scaling up so difficult? And how do shocks, like conflict or instability, affect the ability to scale up ideas within development?

A whole set of things makes it challenging. The most important reason is that scaling up is a transformation. It takes a whole value chain of aspects that need to be right to be able to scale up successfully. Moreover, the organization that starts and the one that scales are completely different. Scaling up is really a long journey of discovery, failure, adaptation, and letting go. Sometimes, letting go involves parting with what is not essential, striving towards a minimum viable intervention. Unfortunately, one cannot scale an intervention with all its bells and whistles, and it is important to make the solution leaner as it transfers to other contexts. At Imago, we often work with organizations to help them let go of parts of their model to be able to scale. Letting go also involves moving beyond the visionary founder and building leaders at all levels. In addition, organizations struggle with scaling due to challenges in retaining core values, transitioning from informal to formal internal systems, and shifting focus from anecdotal impact stories to concrete evidence and data.

Finally, the environment to scale can be tough. Different pathways to scale, via the market or government, have their own unique challenges. And funders, key enablers to scale often, demand quick results, are solutions as opposed to problem-oriented, and dislike deviation from plans, all of which are counter to basic scaling principles.

Now, on instability and crisis, maybe I’m an optimist but I think that these moments of crisis often represent accelerators of very successful disruptions. A lot of unicorns came out of the 2008 economic crisis, and the disruption brought about the incubation of new ideas that are now established companies. COVID-19, when we look back, is going to be one of these moments. There are moments in which an innovation is already starting to show that it needs disruption from outside the system for it to scale. And something like COVID, a shock that is so prolonged and so deep and complex, indicates the system is not as resilient, paving the path for new innovations to scale. Conflict is a different story in that it, depending on the nature and level, can be so depleting. That said, and I may be overly hopeful, but conflict activates the most powerful levers in systems change—mental shifts. Many movements – climate change activism, black lives matter, and peace activism—are important parts of society, helping raise awareness and the conditions for major mental shifts that drive sustainable change at scale.

Q: What sort of tools do you offer your readers for the process of scaling up?

Before we dive into tools, the overall approach of the book is about asking questions as opposed to prescribing answers. And throughout, we take inspiration from a variety of disciplines, whether it’s from economics, psychology, system thinking, design thinking, and so on to inform our approach.

The foundational tool is the scaling-up framework. It includes aspects of an organization's vision, the system in which they operate, the business model, the foundations or scaffolding for scaling, and evidence, which is the common thread throughout. And this is very much in terms of guiding questions at each step.

Another set of tools comes from the broad category of adaptive management. Here, we go into the worlds of design thinking, human-centered design, and agile management. Now, these tools are, of course, applied heavily in the private sector but need to be adapted to the development context, and in the book, we discuss how.

The last set of techniques are part of Adaptive Evaluation, which we see as a journey of meaning-making to accompany the scaling process. It involves mapping the system, identifying intervention touchpoints in the system, analyzing blockages and change levers, and then deriving a theory of change that is tested with evolving evidence. The final step is to use evidence to inform intervention design and implementation over frequent learning cycles. The spirit of adaptive evaluation is that techniques are adapted to the stage of scaling. Early-stage pilots need different techniques and approaches than full scaling, and the book goes into these with examples of two outstanding learning organizations, Pratham and One Acre Fund.

Q: You began by saying one motivation was to change development thinking. How does this book offer a different vision of scaling up?

A few broad themes emerge from the book that we think offer a different perspective. One is the powerful idea of putting people at the center of the solution, not seeing those who are closest to the problem or the experience as mere spectators, but also as actively participating and co-creating the solutions. Time and time again, we have seen organizations and solutions that scaled have a component of involving the people who are closest to the problem as active participants.

Another big theme in the book is this aspect of adaptation, experimentation, and learning. Scaling up is a dynamic process without a known destination, where best practices do not apply, and one needs to remain open to what will emerge. It’s not only the science of whether something works but how something works and how we can take something that works in a particular entity, organization, or context to another context. That inherently involves some adaptation, some learning to fit the new context and remain relevant as it evolves.

And the third part, which I have already touched upon, but worth reiterating, is the role of systems. We see scaling up as being about navigating, understanding, constantly learning about, and at times, even transforming complex systems. This is about working at different levels in the system, building ownership, and working with other stakeholders towards a common goal.

Overall, a key difference in the way that we see development and scaling up is our comprehensive approach. We embrace complexity and try to delve into all the different areas of the systems in which we operate, thinking beyond economics.

Visit the Scaling Up Development Impact website to learn more.