The Success Case Method
organizations today are in a constant struggle to renew themselves
and their processes, continuously trying out new ways of
being more effective and competitive. People at all levels are
faced with an endless parade of new technology, new ways of organization,
new tools, new methods, new training programs, new jobs, and so on.
• An automobile manufacturer introduces a new team assembly
approach
• A furniture company employs laptop computers to help salespeople
present a dizzying array of potential office configurations
• Ambulance crews use wireless communications to communicate
with a remote physician who provides real-time directions
for care
• Airline security staff have access to new databases to scan passengers
in an attempt to spot likely candidates for increased
scrutiny
• Telecommunications operators receive listening training to
help them better establish rapport, in an attempt to increase
customer satisfaction
• A hotel chain provides cash incentives to housecleaning staff to
help drive repeat business
How successful these innovations will be is anyone’s guess, but
what is always known is this: Some parts of these new initiatives will
work some of the time with some of the people; other parts will work
barely at all. Some people will experience success, and others will be
frustrated and fail. Almost never will any of these changes work perfectly
well with everyone. On the other hand, it is also unlikely that
these changes will be a total failure—someone, somehow, will make at
least some of them work.
Those whose job it is to make them work have a daunting challenge.
They must have some ways of finding out—as quickly and easily as possible—which things are working and which are not; what parts
of new innovations are working well enough to be left alone, which
need revision, and which should be abandoned.
The Success Case Method (SCM) is designed to confront and leverage
this reality. The partial success of a new initiative, no matter how
small it is or how few are able to make it work is, nonetheless, success,
and success is what we are aiming for. The SCM searches out and surfaces
these successes, bringing them to light in persuasive and compelling
stories so that they can be weighed (are they good enough?),
provided as motivating and concrete examples to others, and learned
from so that we have a better understanding of why things worked, and
why they did not. With this knowledge, success can be built on and
extended; faltering efforts can be changed or abandoned, and premising
efforts can be noticed and nurtured.
But most change leaders and managers are in a bind. On the one
hand, they have to guide and manage new innovations to make things
work better, and on the other hand, they have very little time to find
out what they need to know to do this. The easiest way to find out if
things are working is to rely on hunches, guesses, and informal bits of
information picked up here and there. These casual methods, however,
leave too much room for error and misinformation. At the other end of
the spectrum are full-blown audits, program reviews, and formal evaluation
studies, but these are almost always too costly and time consuming
and can end up providing too much information, too late to be
helpful, or in such a dry and abstract form that no one pays attention.
In between is the SC Method, a relatively quick and easy method
of finding out what is working and what is not, which also provides
accurate and trustworthy information that can be used to make timely
decisions.
Storytelling is at the heart of the SCM, and the principal output of
an SCM study is stories. Across human history, stories are what we have
used to understand and make sense of the world around us. We use stories
because they have, for untold millennia, enchanted, moved, and
entertained us. Stories tap deep emotion and command attention. All of
us remember our favorite stories from childhood and will recall with
fond emotion the warmth and comfort of a storytelling session.
Stories, however, can also be suspicious and questionable, as in
fables and fantasies. We will probably remember as children that we
were admonished not to “tell a story” (that is, a lie). The SCM deals with
the suspicion that stories can generate in two key ways. First, we don’t
use the SCM to find and tell just any old story. We seek out and document
the best, and the worst, that a new change or innovation is producing,
and carefully capture the essence of these positive and negative
experiences in carefully documented stories. The second way that the
SCM produces credibility and persuasiveness is with truthfulness. SCM
stories are not hearsay evidence or opinion. As will be seen later in the
book, they must be confirmable experiences that can be backed up with
corroboration and evidence. A story that cannot be confirmed is not a
success story. Our criterion for the veracity of a success story is that it
must tell how a person actually used something, and the actual results
they got, in a way that would “stand up in court.”
The SCM is a carefully balanced blend of the ancient art of storytelling
with more modern methods and principles of rigorous evaluative
inquiry and research. But the SCM is also practical. We employ
sound principles of inquiry to seek out the right stories to tell, and we
back them up with solid evidence. On the other hand, we don’t try to
tell all the stories that could be told, nor go overboard with exhaustive
data collection and statistical analyses.
The Success Case Method
organizations today are in a constant struggle to renew themselves
and their processes, continuously trying out new ways of
being more effective and competitive. People at all levels are
faced with an endless parade of new technology, new ways of organization,
new tools, new methods, new training programs, new jobs, and so on.
• An automobile manufacturer introduces a new team assembly
approach
• A furniture company employs laptop computers to help salespeople
present a dizzying array of potential office configurations
• Ambulance crews use wireless communications to communicate
with a remote physician who provides real-time directions
for care
• Airline security staff have access to new databases to scan passengers
in an attempt to spot likely candidates for increased
scrutiny
• Telecommunications operators receive listening training to
help them better establish rapport, in an attempt to increase
customer satisfaction
• A hotel chain provides cash incentives to housecleaning staff to
help drive repeat business
How successful these innovations will be is anyone’s guess, but
what is always known is this: Some parts of these new initiatives will
work some of the time with some of the people; other parts will work
barely at all. Some people will experience success, and others will be
frustrated and fail. Almost never will any of these changes work perfectly
well with everyone. On the other hand, it is also unlikely that
these changes will be a total failure—someone, somehow, will make at
least some of them work.
Those whose job it is to make them work have a daunting challenge.
They must have some ways of finding out—as quickly and easily as possible—which things are working and which are not; what parts
of new innovations are working well enough to be left alone, which
need revision, and which should be abandoned.
The Success Case Method (SCM) is designed to confront and leverage
this reality. The partial success of a new initiative, no matter how
small it is or how few are able to make it work is, nonetheless, success,
and success is what we are aiming for. The SCM searches out and surfaces
these successes, bringing them to light in persuasive and compelling
stories so that they can be weighed (are they good enough?),
provided as motivating and concrete examples to others, and learned
from so that we have a better understanding of why things worked, and
why they did not. With this knowledge, success can be built on and
extended; faltering efforts can be changed or abandoned, and premising
efforts can be noticed and nurtured.
But most change leaders and managers are in a bind. On the one
hand, they have to guide and manage new innovations to make things
work better, and on the other hand, they have very little time to find
out what they need to know to do this. The easiest way to find out if
things are working is to rely on hunches, guesses, and informal bits of
information picked up here and there. These casual methods, however,
leave too much room for error and misinformation. At the other end of
the spectrum are full-blown audits, program reviews, and formal evaluation
studies, but these are almost always too costly and time consuming
and can end up providing too much information, too late to be
helpful, or in such a dry and abstract form that no one pays attention.
In between is the SC Method, a relatively quick and easy method
of finding out what is working and what is not, which also provides
accurate and trustworthy information that can be used to make timely
decisions.
Storytelling is at the heart of the SCM, and the principal output of
an SCM study is stories. Across human history, stories are what we have
used to understand and make sense of the world around us. We use stories
because they have, for untold millennia, enchanted, moved, and
entertained us. Stories tap deep emotion and command attention. All of
us remember our favorite stories from childhood and will recall with
fond emotion the warmth and comfort of a storytelling session.
Stories, however, can also be suspicious and questionable, as in
fables and fantasies. We will probably remember as children that we
were admonished not to “tell a story” (that is, a lie). The SCM deals with
the suspicion that stories can generate in two key ways. First, we don’t
use the SCM to find and tell just any old story. We seek out and document
the best, and the worst, that a new change or innovation is producing,
and carefully capture the essence of these positive and negative
experiences in carefully documented stories. The second way that the
SCM produces credibility and persuasiveness is with truthfulness. SCM
stories are not hearsay evidence or opinion. As will be seen later in the
book, they must be confirmable experiences that can be backed up with
corroboration and evidence. A story that cannot be confirmed is not a
success story. Our criterion for the veracity of a success story is that it
must tell how a person actually used something, and the actual results
they got, in a way that would “stand up in court.”
The SCM is a carefully balanced blend of the ancient art of storytelling
with more modern methods and principles of rigorous evaluative
inquiry and research. But the SCM is also practical. We employ
sound principles of inquiry to seek out the right stories to tell, and we
back them up with solid evidence. On the other hand, we don’t try to
tell all the stories that could be told, nor go overboard with exhaustive
data collection and statistical analyses.
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