Why Good Projects Hit a Coordination Ceiling

A successful pilot creates a seductive question: how do we scale it?

The usual answers are predictable. More funding, more locations, more partners, more staff. But sometimes scale is blocked by something else.

Imagine a city tests a cooling intervention in one market. It works. Workers are more comfortable, heat exposure falls and local officials support it. The instinct is to replicate the project in twenty markets.

Then reality arrives.

Who owns the new sites? Who maintains them? Which department budgets for them? Are procurement rules suitable? Does the electricity system support the added demand? Is there a standard design? Who trains operators? Which evidence convinces other cities?

The original project has succeeded. The surrounding system has not yet learned how to absorb it.

That distinction changes how we think about scale. We usually treat scale as a property of the intervention. Perhaps it is partly a property of the system around the intervention.

Collective-impact thinking has long argued that large-scale change depends on aligned activities, shared measurement and dedicated coordination rather than on multiplying isolated programmes. Systems-orchestration thinking pushes the point further: a system can contain capable individual actors and still produce weak collective outcomes when coherence is missing.

This suggests the existence of a coordination ceiling.

Below that ceiling, a good organisation can compensate for system weakness through exceptional effort. It negotiates every permission, builds every relationship, finds every specialist and solves every procurement problem. This works at pilot scale because heroic effort is affordable.

Then replication multiplies the coordination burden faster than the organisation can carry it.

Scale stalls.

The usual diagnosis is insufficient funding. But throwing more money at the implementing organisation may only make the bottleneck more expensive.

The better question is: what would have to become normal for this intervention to stop requiring heroics?

Perhaps procurement rules need to change. Perhaps a standard has to be adopted. Perhaps local technicians need training. Perhaps financing needs to move into an existing public budget. Perhaps a ministry has to own the outcome. Perhaps data have to enter a routine planning system.

These are not replication activities. They are system-absorption activities.

There is an important objection. Not every pilot deserves to scale. Sometimes a project remains small because it is expensive, context-specific or simply not very good. Proof of effectiveness still matters.

But even a proven intervention can fail to spread if the environment around it cannot receive it.

Think of transplantation. A healthy plant does not survive merely because the plant is healthy. The soil has to support it.

This changes the meaning of project preparation too. We usually prepare the intervention. Scaling may require preparing the surrounding system.

The deeper implication is uncomfortable for funders because system absorption is slower than replication. It involves policy, budgets, workforce, standards, institutions and relationships.

But that may be exactly why so many promising pilots remain pilots.

We have been asking how to copy the intervention.

We should also ask how to prepare the system to receive it.

Sources

Kania & Kramer, Collective Impact.
Dhanaraj & Parkhe, Orchestrating Innovation Networks.
Systems Orchestration, Coordinating Complex Change.