SCALE is the acronym for the five ExO attributes that help an organization connect with abundance in the world. Accessing existing untapped abundance is the basis for building an Exponential Organization. The five ExO attributes that look outside of the organization to connect you with abundance are: Staff on Demand, Community & Crowd, Algorithms, Leveraged Assets, and Engagement.

Understanding the particular nature of each attribute and which ones best support your business model and objectives for scaling is the first step to becoming an ExO. Most important, SCALE attributes allow the organization to maintain a small resource footprint while using the techniques to grow rapidly and flexibly.

Where is there untapped abundance in the world that can contribute to the achievement of your MTP?

Where does your current business rely on scarce or limited resources? What would your business be if these resources became abundant and free?

The number of people connected through technology is anticipated to grow from three billion to between five and seven billion in the coming years. What opportunities does this create for your business?

STAFF ON DEMAND

COMMUNITY & CROWD

ALGORITHMS

LEVERAGED ASSETS

ENGAGEMENT

Staff On Demand

Most of the bright people don't work for you, no matter who you are.

– Bill Joy, computer scientist

If your business is growing exponentially—or if you want it to—you must continually improve your product or service. Your ability to adjust the composition, skill base, and responsibilities of your workforce needs to keep pace. By not “owning” employees and the weight of their associated infrastructure, you can achieve agility and flexibility within your organization.

The Staff on Demand attribute relies on a pool of prequalified workers hired on an as-needed basis to conduct operational elements of your core business. Responsibilities range from simple tasks to complex work, and may even include mission-critical processes.

Drawing on resources beyond the confines of your organization and traditional hiring processes opens up the opportunity to access an incredible wealth and diversity of talent. The fresh perspectives generated by a global workforce provide a steady stream of insights, allowing you to learn and quickly improve your product or service. Use this attribute to access the brightest minds in your industry and to tap into unused capacity and potential.

An ExO applying the Staff on Demand attribute at its most extreme would see a relatively small core team conducting business almost entirely with external resources. Note that the scalability—sourcing resources at low-to-zero marginal cost—the Staff on Demand attribute permits is essential to the growth of an ExO.

Community & Crowd

If you build communities and you do things in public, you don't have to find the right people–they find you.

– Chris Anderson, founder, DIY Drones

The world is a big place. What highly successful ExOs have in common is their ability to reach into the global public, draw together large groups of individuals who share their purpose, and leverage them as resources. A compelling MTP and an enabling platform are the hallmarks of ExOs that do this well.

Community, in the ExO context, is made up of a large global group of individuals who are passionate about your MTP and are directly involved in the main functions of your organization. They are loyal to a shared goal and devoted to solving the grand challenges surrounding your organization's purpose.

In some cases, community is the foundation of the business. Companies like TEDx or Airbnb are entirely defined by the communities they have assembled. In other cases, community is adjacent to the core business and provides a valuable benefit complementary to the primary offering (such as the Apple Support Communities). In the most advanced ExOs, community drives everything but the purpose.

Crowd is made up of an even larger global group of individuals—including infrequent users—who have some passive interest in your MTP but are not (yet) directly connected to your organization. Crowd can be used to provide ideation, validation, and support for your ideas. Your goal is to make it easy and compelling for promising crowd members to move into community.

Leveraging shared passion for your MTP and providing a platform for peer-to-peer engagement opens your business to a world of opportunity. Crowdsourcing ideas and feedback, crowdfunding to finance new concepts, creating “prosumers” who build your product or service with you, and having ready markets for new offerings are examples of what can be achieved with the Community & Crowd attribute.

Multiple categories of individuals are contained within Community. Each layer has a different level of commitment to your MTP, is engaged to a different degree, and requires a different type of attention.

Algorithms

Artificial Intelligence is not going to replace us, it's going to enhance us.

It already does.

– Ray Kurzweil, inventor, author, and futurist

As we plunge headlong into the Digital Age, and more and more elements of the physical world evolve to include some digital aspect, it is easy to see that algorithms—which offer the means to make sense of all that information—represent the very foundation of business survival.

An algorithm is simply a step-by-step set of instructions that is used to automate a task or solve a specific problem. The field of Artificial Intelligence (AI) explores how algorithms can be made “intelligent”—learning to solve problems without a predetermined set of instructions and creating new solutions to new problems without human intervention. AI enables computer systems to behave and/or “think” like humans—to solve complex problems and learn over time with improving performance.

Algorithms and AI learn by recognizing patterns in text, images, videos, voice, and any other digital-based data. A system can also learn by itself through experience and/or analyzing previous use cases. Learning algorithms have existed for many years, but the current abundance of data and computing power are finally allowing them to provide real value and results to businesses. Science fiction is turning into “science reality.”

ExOs use algorithms to automate what people are doing, so that as the business grows it isn't necessary to increase staff at the same pace. The current trend is to use Artificial Intelligence and algorithms to automate the operations of an organization. Increasingly, they will be used for the more complex tasks currently conducted by the core team and staff on demand and are further expected to reach the level of human intelligence in the next couple of decades.

The more sophisticated your use of algorithms, the better your ability to leverage the massive amount of information that current and emerging technology gives you the ability to capture. (Cisco estimates that by 2030, some 500 billion devices will be connected globally, each with embedded sensors that collect data.)

For an ExO, algorithms allow products and services to be fully scaled and improve quality by finding better solutions to problems—through decision support systems, for example. They allow for the mass manipulation of data to leverage its benefits, are easily updated, compensate for human biases, and get better every day. Algorithms are your competitive advantage when doing business at scale.

Leveraged Assets

Marriott wants to add 30,000 hotel rooms in 2014. We will do that in the next two weeks.

– Brian Chesky, co-founder and CEO, Airbnb

Uber owns no cars, yet it manages one of the largest fleets of person-delivery vehicles on the planet, fleets that span dozens of countries. Airbnb owns no hotel rooms, yet in 2017 had four million listings worldwide—more than the top five hotel brands combined. These classic ExO examples illustrate how leveraging, rather than owning, physical property can dramatically change the economics of your business.

Renting, accessing, or sharing assets, even those that are mission-critical, allow an organization to stay nimble and unencumbered. Marginal cost of supply is significantly lowered—to virtually zero in the case of a highly scaled model. By not owning physical property, you remove the costs associated with managing it, along with all related infrastructure costs.

Similar to Staff on Demand, the Leveraged Assets attribute gives you on-demand access to resources, replacing the need for ownership. For example, cloud computing stores your data on a provider's server, rather than on your own server or hard drive, and hackerspaces offer access to shared workspace and tools for projects.

Using customer assets is a powerful way to achieve leverage and create scalable products or services. Netflix uses its customers' devices to display movies, and Waze collects realtime traffic information from each user's smartphone or tablet, bypassing the need for dedicated devices or networks.

An ExO applying the Leveraged Assets attribute at its most extreme would have no owned physical assets, essentially eliminating asset-based fixed costs and providing the organization great flexibility.

Engagement

Growth without engagement is a leaky bucket.

– Nir Eyal, entrepreneur and author

The most powerful motivators in creating value and action on a massive scale are a sense of belonging and engagement with a common cause. Your MTP is the starting point for attracting customers, crowd, and community. Engagement is the use of techniques such as reputation systems, gamification, loyalty programs, and incentive prizes to keep these groups interested, involved, and increasingly committed to your shared purpose.

Through Engagement, you gain the loyalty of your customers and community, and create an effective means of converting crowd into community. Engagement allows you to know your customers, crowd, and community more intimately, and better understand how to meet their needs.

What motivates each of these groups? Applying different engagement techniques provides the opportunity to leverage your marketing and experiment with different approaches. Create or share relevant content to help convert crowd to community. Use digital reputation systems to attract, motivate, and create trust among community members. Positive feedback from fully engaged users can have a favorable compounding effect, creating virtuous cycles.

Service transparency plays a large role in customer engagement. FedEx and UPS let you track your package from shipment to delivery. Uber allows you to track the progress of your ride from dispatch to arrival. Many traditionally opaque business processes can be transformed by using transparency to allow the user a sense of agency and impact.

Gamification and incentivizing results are extremely effective engagement techniques. Many best-use cases for applying engagement techniques can be found in learning platforms and adapted for your business, including for improving your product or service. How will you compel people to use your product or service every day?