FASS3999 Chap.6 Scale, Time Horizon and Power
Scale, Time Horizon and Power
The Week 5 case-lead seminars add three lenses that sharpen any comparison of partners. The housing debrief makes the first two explicit: the scale of an intervention, from an individual to a community, a system or government, is a different dimension from its time horizon, which can be immediate, medium or long term. Treating them as one leads to unfair comparisons, such as judging a crisis service by system-wide outcomes.
The third lens is power, captured in three questions about who makes decisions, who benefits and who is missing. The migration seminar extends these with two practical contrasts: a deficit model against a strengths-based one, and consultation as box-ticking against co-design as a lasting relationship.
This chapter shows how to place partners on a scale and time grid, repair arguments that blur the axes, and use the power contrasts fairly when organisations sit somewhere between the columns.
What this chapter covers
- 01
Scale of intervention from individual to government
- 02
Time horizon as a separate dimension
- 03
Placing partners and your own idea on the grid
- 04
Who decides, who benefits and who is missing
- 05
Deficit and strengths-based starting questions
- 06
Consultation compared with co-design
- 07
Lived experience as a form of expertise
Worked example · free
Plotting three responses to food insecurity among students
- +1Pantry: individual scale, immediate horizon; it relieves hunger this week.
- +1Meal plan: community scale, medium horizon; it changes conditions for a cohort over a year.
- +1Advocacy: system or government scale, long horizon; effects depend on policy change.
- +1Power for the pantry: staff decide stock and hours, students in crisis benefit, and those who feel stigma or work during opening hours are missing.
Key terms
- Scale of Intervention
- The level at which an action operates, ranging from a single person to a community, a system or government.
- Time Horizon
- How soon an intervention's effects are expected to appear, from immediate relief to long-term change.
- Deficit Model
- An approach that starts from what people lack and positions services as fixing them.
- Strengths-based Model
- An approach that starts from the knowledge and capability people bring and asks what blocks them.
- Co-design
- A practice in which affected communities help shape a problem and its response from the start, through an ongoing relationship.
- Lived Experience
- Knowledge gained by personally living through an issue, treated by many organisations as a form of expertise.
Scale, Time Horizon and Power FAQ
Why separate scale from time horizon?
An intervention can be small and urgent or large and slow, and those combinations call for different success measures. Separating the axes stops you from criticising a crisis service for failing to fix an entire system.
What are the three power questions?
Ask who is the primary decision maker, who benefits from the intervention, and who is missing or left out. Together they show on whose terms an organisation works and where a gap may lie.
What does a strengths-based approach change?
It replaces the question of what people lack with the question of what capability they bring and what blocks it. That shift moves attention from fixing individuals to changing barriers in systems.
How do I tell consultation from co-design?
Check timing, format and outcome. Consultation typically happens after a plan is set, in one-off events; co-design involves people before the problem is defined and gives them a route into decisions over time.
Assessment move
Draw a blank scale and time grid on one page and keep it beside you during the case-lead seminar. Plot every partner and every idea your group discusses, using a dot and a short label. When two dots sit in different cells, write a sentence explaining why a direct comparison of their effectiveness would be unfair.
Next, write the three power questions at the top of a second page and answer them for each partner using published evidence such as annual reports, governance pages and program descriptions. Treat the deficit and co-design contrasts as rows of questions rather than verdicts, and note evidence for each partner on both sides.
You will usually find a mixed picture, and reporting it honestly reads as stronger analysis than a tidy label. Apply the same questions to your own group project: who sets its goals, who would benefit and who has not been asked. Finally, look for empty cells on your grid. A stretch of time or a level of scale that no partner occupies is one of the clearest starting points for a project gap.
