What is Scaling Up?
Someone develops something new and uses it. Other users adapt it (and adopt it) for their own situations, and then develop it further.
This is relatively straightforward with new inventions and developments in technology but scaling up is particularly challenging for entities that have a cultural dimension as I will expand on a little more in the two posts, 5.4.9.2 and 5.4.9.3 below. Part of the reason for this is that the people – i.e. the culture – around the developer or inventor needs to be receptive to the innovation.
In a previous Chapter I discussed Cultural Matching at length. I will revisit it here briefly in respect of the challenge to scale-up, or expand our practice and the implications that expanding has for training, supervision, courses etc.
The usual method of scaling up something is to train practitioners who will undertake whatever is to be scaled-up and then train trainers so that the trainers can train new practitioners and so on.
For example, if we discover a new way of doing open-heart surgery, and we want this to be replicated world-wide because it is superior to the old method, we train a small group of surgeons to do it. They then do it in the field (or, in the operating theatres – in this case) until they are proficient in it. Some of them (usually the more academically inclined ones) are then invited to be trainers.
The group of trainer surgeons are then educated to a high standard in all aspects of the new operating methods so they can train new trainee surgeons. The number of surgeons with sufficient expertise grows and grows and this is how the new open-heart surgery method is scaled up.
This is true for skills in almost all areas of work throughout the world.