Why Some Ideas will Always Remain Small

Brief 

Some ideas that find small-scale success won’t scale because they have fatal flaws, rely on rare or unique human traits or cause unexpected effects that mitigate the benefits, writes Lyft Chief Economist John List. “For an enterprise to hold strong at scale, first you need to understand your non-negotiables — what were the drivers of the initial success?” List writes.

Insight

ohn List is a professor of economics at the University of Chicago. He is also the Chief Economist at Lyft, and Co-Director of various research centers around the world, including the John Mitchell Lab at Australian National University, the JILAEE lab in Argentina, and the TMW center at the University of Chicago.

Below, John shares 5 key insights from his new book, The Voltage Effect: How to Make Good Ideas Great and Great Ideas Scale. Listen to the audio version—read by John himself—in the Next Big Idea App.

1. The voltage effect is the first law of scaling.

In 2007, the city of Chicago Heights asked for my help in improving their community. So in 2008 I partnered with Roland Fryer and Steve Levitt to start a preschool in Chicago Heights.

We built this school from soup to nuts, and after a few years, I was very proud of the results: children improved immensely, and we were showing how a preschool can lessen the opportunity gap. I wanted every child in the world to experience my program.

But I was met with a slap in the face from policymakers. They said, “Professor List, your program had an impressive benefit profile, but don’t expect it to happen at scale.” I inquired why, and they said, “All of the experts tell us that their intervention will work, but treatment results aren’t close to what they promise.”

So, I began researching if what happens in the small is different from what happens in the large—and it was. This is what I call the “voltage effect,” which describes what happens when you move from the small to the large.