The Voltage Effect¶
List, J. A. (2022). The Voltage Effect: How to Make Good Ideas Great and Great Ideas Scale. Crown Currency.
Cited by¶
4 citations across 4 artifacts.
Each citation links to the sentence it supports in the citing article.
Primes¶
- Training Serving Skew
- Military and emergency-response training: a unit drilled on a standardised exercise deployed to an operation where terrain, opposition, and timing differ, so drill-effective tactics fail in the field. Education and assessment: students prepared under one assessment regime (structured tests) deployed into a different one (open-ended workplace problems), where prep-regime skills underperform. Pilot programmes and policy rollouts: an intervention piloted under motivated early adopters and intensive support, scaled to a population that differs systematically, with effects that shrink or invert.
This sourceDocuments 'voltage drop' — pilot-program effects that shrink or vanish at scale when the scaled population differs systematically from the pilot's (false positives, non-representative samples, implementation dilution).
- Military and emergency-response training: a unit drilled on a standardised exercise deployed to an operation where terrain, opposition, and timing differ, so drill-effective tactics fail in the field. Education and assessment: students prepared under one assessment regime (structured tests) deployed into a different one (open-ended workplace problems), where prep-regime skills underperform. Pilot programmes and policy rollouts: an intervention piloted under motivated early adopters and intensive support, scaled to a population that differs systematically, with effects that shrink or invert.
Mechanisms¶
- Pilot-to-Scale Gate
- Its signature failure mode is the voltage drop — a pilot that succeeds and then fails to replicate at scale, because the pilot enjoyed advantages the full rollout cannot: hand-picked sites, unusually motivated staff, or founder attention that does not scale.
This sourceDefines a voltage drop as a successful pilot failing to replicate at scale.
- Its signature failure mode is the voltage drop — a pilot that succeeds and then fails to replicate at scale, because the pilot enjoyed advantages the full rollout cannot: hand-picked sites, unusually motivated staff, or founder attention that does not scale.
- Pilot-to-Scale Validation
- Its central failure mode is the voltage drop: an effect that shrinks or vanishes at scale because the pilot enjoyed hand-picked staff, extra attention, or a favorable site that the full rollout cannot reproduce.
This sourceDefines a voltage drop as a small-group success that diminishes when replicated at larger scale because key ingredients, including scarce talent, do not scale.
- Its central failure mode is the voltage drop: an effect that shrinks or vanishes at scale because the pilot enjoyed hand-picked staff, extra attention, or a favorable site that the full rollout cannot reproduce.
- Staged Policy Trial
- Its deep failure mode is the voltage effect
This sourceDefines “voltage” as an idea’s ability to retain its effect when replicated at scale, with “voltage drops” marking failures of scalability.
- Its deep failure mode is the voltage effect
Verification¶
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Does it back the claim? Not recorded. Neither this nor any other of the 4 citations of this work carries a recorded support check.
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Links previously used in the corpus¶
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Registry ID ref:e333c10280c3 · see in the full table