Think about Zoom. Before 2020, it was one of many video-conferencing tools, used by tech teams and remote workers but hardly a household name. Then the pandemic hit. Within weeks, kindergarten classes, corporate board meetings, weddings, therapy sessions, and even funerals moved online. Zoom went from 10 million daily users in December 2019 to over 300 million by April 2020. That’s scale—when context and need snap into alignment and an “app” suddenly becomes social infrastructure.
Zoom didn’t succeed just because the software worked. It scaled because internet bandwidth, cloud capacity, user readiness, and cultural desperation for connection all aligned. The world was primed. Overnight, Zoom wasn’t just a product—it was a platform, rewiring education, healthcare, and workplace culture in real time.
Here’s the leadership lesson: if scale can happen this fast, leaders can’t just prepare for success; they must prepare for consequences. Scaling doesn’t only multiply opportunity—it multiplies responsibility.
Lightning Strikes and History’s Lag
Some inventions appear before the world is ready. Take Hero of Alexandria in the first century CE. He built the aeolipile—a whistling, spinning steam device that looked like a jet engine’s ancestor. Roman crowds clapped politely, then went back to their aqueducts and gladiators. Why? Because Rome had no coal mines to drain, no industries to mechanize, no economic models to reward replacing muscle with machines. Hero had brilliance, but no ecosystem or demand.
Seventeen centuries later, James Watt refined steam engines just as Europe was choking on coal smoke, metallurgy could finally handle pressure, and capitalism was hungry for productivity. His engines didn’t just pump water; they powered mills, locomotives, and empires. The invention matched the grid.
Then Robert Fulton put steam engines on boats and sold tickets. The Clermont wasn’t just a machine; it was a platform. It connected engines, rivers, passengers, and merchants into a system that could carry commerce. People didn’t buy a steamboat; they bought faster markets. The steamboat scaled because it linked invention to adoption.
Lesson: technology alone never changes the world. Scale happens when timing, infrastructure, and demand align. Too early, and you’re trivia. Well-timed but disconnected, and you’re a footnote. Aligned with the system? You power an age.
Penicillin: The Cure That Waited
Alexander Fleming discovered penicillin in 1928. It was revolutionary but sat idle for years. Production was fragile, spoilage was high, and no company raced to industrialize it. Then World War II created urgent demand. Governments mobilized scientists, industry redesigned fermentation tanks, and by 1945 penicillin was everywhere. Science hadn’t changed—scale conditions had.
AI: A 70-Year Overnight Success
Artificial Intelligence was born in 1956 and drifted for decades in labs and fiction. Then between 2017 and 2023, conditions snapped into place:
• Transformer models unlocked new capabilities.
• Cloud GPUs made massive training cheap.
• Open-source tools spread access.
• Big Tech poured in money.
• The public was already AI-literate through Siri and Netflix.
• Developers were hungry.
The algorithms didn’t suddenly become magical. The ecosystem aligned. AI scaled because the grid was ready. Scaling = Timing + Readiness + Responsibility
Here’s the paradox: scaling is both a decision and a discovery. You can plan to scale, but it only works if the world can carry the weight. Push too early and you implode. Push without readiness and you create more damage than value.
This is where polyintelligent leadership matters. Scale isn’t just growth; it’s consequence. When everything is connected, scaling a product also scales its risks. Launch a new AI app, and you may destabilize education, privacy, and jobs before lunch.
That’s why scaling needs doctrine.
The Stewardship Mandate
Every act of scaling is also an act of system redesign. Leaders must ask:
• What happens when this grows 100x?
• Who benefits, and who gets left behind?
• Which ecosystems—human, natural, economic—will be stressed?
• Can our infrastructure, institutions, and values keep pace?
Scale without stewardship multiplies chaos. Scale with stewardship multiplies resilience.
Why Scale Is a Polyintelligent Challenge
Scale used to be an industrial word. Today it’s ecological, cultural, moral, and temporal. Scaling responsibly requires:
• Machine intelligence to sense when conditions are ripe.
• Ecological intelligence to interpret long-loop consequences.
• Human intelligence to align growth with ethics and values.
Here’s the critical point: when scale accelerates faster than human cognition can handle, only machine intelligence can keep tempo. But when machines make decisions at scale, human and ecological intelligences must set the boundaries.
Scaling, then, is not just about expansion. It is about coherence—synchronizing tempo across systems so growth strengthens rather than fractures. That’s the true work of polyintelligent leadership.
Who knew clocks and time dimensions could be so important to running a company? In the next article in this series we’ll study three of them that will shape our future.
*I use AI in all my work.
************************************************************************
Kevin Benedict
Futurist, and Lecturer at TCS
View my profile on LinkedIn
Follow me on X @krbenedict
Join the Linkedin Group Digital Intelligence
***Full Disclosure: These are my personal opinions. No company is silly enough to claim them. I work with and have worked with many of the companies mentioned in my articles.
No comments:
Post a Comment