There is an unhelpful tendency in the social/community sector to focus on a narrow number of highly marketable community projects and say – they’ve proven the concept, let’s replicate them! To view replication at scale as a matter of sharing compelling case studies so that others can follow their example. But it rarely works like that, at least not at any scale, and especially not in domains like property development and housing where projects take at least 5 years and must contend with a system hostile to any kind of new entrant. (When we talk about scale, we rarely define what we mean. Do we want 100 similar projects? One in every city, town and village? 5% of the market share? The unspoken ambiguity lets us off the hook, permits us to celebrate small-scale success with challenge.) Often, these success stories have been enabled by specific local factors – the…
Tag: <span>Strategy</span>
I’m not really a fan of Malcolm Gladwell and his cohort of star authors who spin one vaguely interesting idea into a entire “paradigm-smashing” book. But he is spot on when he dismisses Twitter as “more of the same… not the enemy of the status quo”. His vaguely interesting idea here is basically that really big changes come about when people with strong social ties are willing to stick it out in a nasty battle to win the day. Social networks with weak ties (e.g. just following each other on Twitter) will fall apart if they try to take on power to make a really big change because in the process they will probably have to suffer a loss of income, physical injury, etc. Twitter messaging won’t motivate them to stick out the hardship. But by pitting Twitter against a political movement as momentous as American Civil Rights in the…