Scaling Education Initiatives

Focused conferences are great ways of scaling initiatives. The attendees are there for largely similar reasons, boosting the odds that you might meet someone who can help progress your own efforts. The keynote speakers give everyone a set of messages that furthers the goals of the organizers, not just those in the room, but to an extended audience with media coverage. And there will be an abundance of ideas and creativity, which means that there is a strong chance that many world improving ideas are floating out there that could have huge impact.

This highlights one of the great challenges in life, and of conferences in particular. How do you scale good ideas so that they have the impact people seek and that the world need?

I was invited to speak at the Global Education and Skills Forum (GESF) in Dubai. Unsurprisingly my topic is on “Designing Programs that Scale“. I am not an education expert, though I have helped on strategy and problem solving for several non-profits, such as Teach a Man to Fish and their School Enterprise Challenge. My area of expertise is in how to scale things, to get a very big impact through a set of small smart moves.

The scale of the challenge in improving education is daunting. However there is a toolset, described as the Scaling Frames in my ‘Scaling‘ book, that has been proven to help design programs that can allow initiatives to reach much greater scale (I will share the slides after the event).

In the meantime I look forward to immersing myself in the new ideas for education, and hope to inspire some people (and give them the tools) to scale their good work.