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.