Everyone in impact talks about scale. Yet no one agrees on what we’re trying to scale. Ask five people to define “impact,” and you’ll get five wildly different answers. Even worse, we act as if a startup improving maternal health in Bihar should be measured by the same rubric as an AI-based upskilling platform in São Paulo.

This lack of clarity stifles innovation. It distorts funding priorities. It creates echo chambers of vanity metrics.

We need to co-create a shared, flexible definition of impact—one that respects context, captures behavioral and systemic change, and is useful to both communities and capital.

The WIP framework offers a starting point:

• Behavior (what people do)

• Systems (what structures support or block it)

• Time (what value endures)

Until we anchor impact in this kind of holistic lens, we’ll keep investing in what’s loudest—not what’s deepest.