My understanding is that VillageReach always had a pretty clear timeline for finishing and publishing their pilot project evaluation.

I’m not sure it’s always a bad thing for an organization to get “stuck in the pilot phase.” What that means to me is that they haven’t yet figured out how to make what they’re doing work (demonstrably) even at a small scale. In such cases, it seems better for them to continue experimenting (or “floundering” depending on your spin) at a small scale rather than at a large scale.

But I do caution one part of your theory. You say that VillageReach:

appears to have stayed as small as possible until the evidence was there. Its first several years were devoted to a single pilot project, and only after the evaluations of this project were complete did it start to look at scaling up and taking on other engagements

Which is excellent that it made this transition, but in following their footsteps it is equally important to note the thousands of organisations that start with pilot and research projects and get stuck there. THey never move on, never break out, never become great. The proving the model goes on forever, especially if it was never set as a time-limited phase towards an eventual ambition. So one organisation rising from this pool doesn’t prove a repeatable pathway, if you get the cautionary tale.

It would be fascinating to understand how they made the jump, whether they started with an embedded ambition and how they knew when the model was proven enough to go big.