SCALES

Six places to change scale

SCALES is the prompt within Resize: Structure, Cycle, Actor, Link, Ensemble, and Service. Use its branches to inspect a smaller or larger unit, time window, actor, connection, group, or service.

Explore the moves and parts

• StructureBreak the thing into its component parts and ask which single part you could study on its own. You are looking for pieces and materials, not timing, people, or purpose. Each part becomes a candidate unit to analyze instead of the whole.
• CycleRe-cut the thing as something that repeats on a clock instead of a fixed object. Ask what its period is, which phase of the loop you are in, and whether the pattern is daily, weekly, monthly, or seasonal.
• ActorRe-cut the problem around a person or agent instead of a thing or process. Ask who actually performs the behavior, and which specific role or version of that person, since different actors do different things at different moments.
• LinkStudy a relationship instead of the things it joins. Ask what passes between two parts, how one feeds the other, and where the handoff breaks. The pair becomes what you measure and change, not either part alone.
• EnsembleStep up from the single instance to the whole set it belongs to. Instead of studying one case, study the population or system of like cases and ask what the distribution shows: how often, how much spread, which outliers, what the group does that no single case reveals.
• ServiceAsk what job the thing is supposed to do, and make that job the unit instead of the object. Where the other lenses cut by parts, timing, people, or connections, this one cuts by function, so anything delivering the same result counts as the same unit.