How to rethink the principles of scale in life and work

Why thinking like an artist can help us to get the scale just right

Dear Rethinkers,

I’ve always been curiously sensitive to the size of things: massive sporting events, multi-story hotels, huge weddings, or parties and megastores. I want to run a mile from these places. Overall, I prefer smaller-scale things in life – my local little bookshop, dinner with a friend, a small clothes shop, or an intimate object made by hand. 

Mother nature is the exception to my scale rule. She knows how to do BIG. Something about swimming in the vastness of the sea or walking through endless stretches of countryside reminds me of how small I am. But not smallness in the sense of being insignificant; smallest in the sense of belonging to something much bigger than my individual self.

Scale shapes our lives in fascinating and profound ways—some visible, others hidden. I’ve long thought that the vastness of society's systems is the root cause of many problems—loneliness, rootlessness, inequity, and alienation. Scale is at the heart of the disconnect from something many of us feel but can’t quite name. 

The scale of the problem

Do any of these sentiments sound or feel familiar? 

• “I don’t want to work for BIG companies anymore.” 

• “I don’t trust BIG tech or BIG pharma or BIG Food or fill-in-the-blank,” 

• “The problems in the world just feel too BIG to fix.”

• “Most scaled-up services feel so big that they don’t care about me.”

Listening to Brené Brown’s new series on Living Beyond Human Scale, she’s put her finger on these feelings about the scale at which we’re living right now. 

“There are so many possibilities around this crazy big stuff happening around us. But at the same time, I’m not sure that we are socially, biologically, cognitively, and spiritually wired to live at this kind of scale.”

So, how can we rethink the principles of scale in our lives and organisations? How can we get better ‘rightsizing’? 

Read on to lean about the difference between scale and size, and why bigger doesn’t necessarily mean better…