A new vocabulary for the 21st Century: Crowdscaling

Let’s consider these numbers that were shared in February of this year:

• 3,190 TEDx events have happened around the world (since 2009)
• 800 cities around the world have hosted one or more TEDx event
• 126 countries have hosted one or more TEDx events
• 12,900 TEDxTalks have been delivered

The first TEDx organizer, Krisztina “Z” Holly, explains these numbers of  growth in the Huffington Post as resulting from  “crowdscaling”:

“Like crowdsourcing, crowdscaling taps into the energy of people around the world that want to contribute. But while crowdsourcing pulls in ideas and content from outside the organization, crowdscaling grows and scales its impact outward by empowering the success of others.”

Krisztina identifies two critical success factors behind “crowdscaling”:

• Adopting a “platform” model of institutional organization

“It is a business strategy that, instead of using a top-down, command-and-control approach for growth, builds on the nature of today’s hyper-connected, open, and globalized world to leverage customers, partners, even competitors. Organizations can achieve enormous scale and influence by creating the platform on which others can build, and aligning stakeholders so they feel partial ownership of the movement.”

• Strong commitment from the top

“While the approach requires only modest investment, it does need a large commitment from the top. It can make typical leaders very uneasy, because they are no longer in complete control. (Imagine having over a thousand volunteer teams, who aren’t employed by you and can’t be fired by you, creating events around the world in your name! That’s enough to give a typical corporate executive night sweats.)”