The Scaling Dynamics That Transform Movements

Volume III's analysis of how existing institutions fail the coordination crisis examined what happens to institutions when the conditions for which they were designed change faster than the institutions can adapt. Providence faces the mirror-image challenge: the conditions for which it is designed will change as it grows, and the growth itself will create pressures to adapt in ways that compromise the design.

The specific scaling dynamics most likely to test the constitutional architecture include: the professionalization pressure, in which the growing institution requires people with professional skills that are available primarily from people whose professional formation occurred in institutions with different values; the growth pressure, in which the legitimate desire to serve more people creates momentum toward accepting compromises that would have been rejected at smaller scale; the complexity pressure, in which the governance processes designed for the founding community become unwieldy at larger scale and are replaced by streamlined processes that are less constitutionally demanding; and the legitimacy pressure, in which the institution seeks recognition from external institutions whose recognition requires conforming to standards that are inconsistent with the constitutional principles.

Each of these pressures has been identified in the history of analogous projects, and each has a track record: they are the mechanisms through which most transformational projects that survive their founding period are transformed by their own growth into something other than what they were founded to be. Providence's design against these pressures is contained in the constitutional architecture of the preceding chapters. The design is as good as the current state of understanding allows. Whether it is good enough will only be knowable in contact with the scaling process itself.