Putting scale at the forefront of project design

Development pilot projects begin with high hopes and good intentions. But too many of them proceed with the mistaken belief that a good idea plus a lot of hope can combine to create lasting, large-scale change, according to Larry Cooley, president and founder of Management Systems International, who has for decades studied the gap between what works at a small scale and what it takes to change a system. In many cases, that gap stems from too much complexity in project design. “If you really design something as a project, and not as a chance to try and test and explore or stretch system change, then you’re going to overdesign,” Cooley told Devex in an exclusive video interview in our Washington, D.C., studio. At a time when foreign assistance dollars must be stretched further, and as donors increasingly shift their attention to local systems — and the positive changes development implementers can bring about within those systems — it is more crucial than ever to understand what it takes to think about scale from the very beginning of the project cycle. Below is the full version of our interview with Cooley, who reflected on the work that MSI is doing to impart the lessons he and his team have learned to donor officials at the U.S. Agency for International Development and elsewhere who can make the operational adjustments necessary to ensure that “scalability” finally takes center stage. See more: Desperately seeking scale as ‘pilot projects’ on the rise