I’m a fan of case studies–both as a teaching tool and a research tool. They’re often disparaged. And caricatured. I certainly had my own reservations when I first encountered them. Why couldn’t somebody just lay out the problem and get on with solving it? What was the point of all the arguments and background and history and politics?
As I’ve written about before, I was eventually invited into the process and became a case writer. Now I was inside the mess and searching for the threads I could weave into something coherent. What had seemed unnecessarily complex as a student was a deliberately crafted simplification of the actual situation.
There’s an old maxim that the best way to learn a subject is to teach it. Writing stories about it is a close second.
In organizational settings becoming a competent performer is a process of learning the important stories. In most organizations that was largely an oral tradition. It was also an oral tradition that largely took care of itself. Most of us could sit back and gather round the watercolor while older and wiser heads clued us in to what was important and what was passing fancy.
That’s not so true anymore. Organizational and environmental change continues to accelerate. The people who might have the perspective to recognize and craft the relevant stories may already be gone or at the tail end of shortening tenures. What was once an organic outgrowth of routine organizational activity now has to be recast as an intentional and designed practice.
I think it has also become a more democratic and decentralized practice. In effect, we must all become case writers about our organizational environments. Resources and power flow to those who can weave the most compelling stories.
It can be tempting to interpret this as an indicator of organizational decay. A better view is that the most coherent stories warrant the organization’s resources. Learning to craft stories that are the right balance of threat and opportunity, tradition and innovation, and process and people becomes the new form of a compelling business case. The business case evolves from being a recitation of facts and figures to a story that enlists the right team of rivals.