ENGAGEMENT AT SCALE.

Engagement at the scale of hundreds of millions of participants raises the question. Scale dilutes most things. Does it dilute engagement?

Managing hundreds or even hundreds of millions of employees, visitors, and members, thousands of merchants or partners, and numerous physical locations individually is impractical and exposes the organization to a lack of foresight—these relationships must instead be managed systematically, through systems and structures. Therefore, the essential factor for sustaining engagement across this extensive scope is a well-designed architecture that keeps participation simple, accessible, and uniform for users who will never have direct contact with the operator.

The three contributors in this cluster illustrate this pattern across three very different scales.

Joey Lai leads a single loyalty program spanning more than 60 markets and serving over 250 million members. The program is deliberately single-tier: no membership fees, no premium levels, designed for the many rather than the select few. It engages the narrative about product culture that IKEA has developed over decades — a brand culture of which the loyalty program becomes the ambassadorial voice.

Rainer Maelzer oversees the guest experience at Therme Group, a global leader in large-scale wellbeing venues that attract 5.5 million visitors each year, engaging them through complex programming and activities. The “front of house” experience is the last mile of an aligned and syncretic organizational and operational structure—one engaged and informed, beyond planning itself, by exchanges with local authorities, cultural institutions, universities, designers, and community stakeholders.

Kazunari Taguchi runs Borderless Japan, a group of independent businesses under a shared platform across fifteen countries that has developed a distinctive structure for engagement at scale. Employees, entrepreneurs and partners are all engaged at the same level and participate in the same way; even milestones and strategic decisions are set by consensus among business representatives rather than top-down. From an engagement perspective, Borderless sits closer to an ecosystem than the other two contributors in this cluster; it is a network of independent businesses using a shared platform and methodologies — and also a collective with a shared purse, and a shared strategy of investing extra profit.

From the three contributions, it appears that large, sophisticated operators are moving to avoid hierarchical structures. They create flat participation structures where every member, guest, or business unit is recognized equally, regardless of contribution. They have the capacity to maintain flat structures and seem increasingly to choose to do so.

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