Case studies are for cowards

by Dr. Leandro Herrero:

Before your blood pressure rises, or you feel outraged by the statement, or a combination of both, let me explain that I am plagiarising a line from the great filmmaker, director, producer and author Werner Herzog, who said ‘storyboards are for cowards’. He wanted to make a point about the stiffness of many film scripts, and the need for deviations and creativity on the spot. Herzog went on to advocate for a more spontaneous and intuitive approach to filmmaking, where the camera and actors are free to explore the scene without being bound by pre-visualized (scripted) shots. I did feature this in my Viral Change™ – Mobilize Masterclass.

It reminds me of an episode of the TV series ‘Succession’, (addiction confessed), created by the great Jesse Armstrong, in which a good, semi-chaotic, never-ending 30 minute episode, with lots of people and lots of action was shot off-script with a single camera. It was most brilliant and breath-taking.

Business case studies, as traditionally conceived, need a retirement party.

Not everybody may agree because they have, above all, incredibly tranquilizing properties. They are a form of executive Valium on paper.

They provide prophylactic certainty to a business world that can’t cope with uncertainty, despite the fact that it spends all its time declaring that uncertainty is inevitable because it represents the nature of reality.

So ‘the case study’ explains that somebody has done XYZ before, this is what happened, read it and you’ll have a canned situation from which to extrapolate. Which is great for those who always ask, ‘can you give me an example of?’ It’s all recorded, a case of this, a case of that, here is the library of examples.

It’s impossible to expect total transferability from case to case but entire generations of MBA’s – such as those who suffered the late ubiquitous Jack Welch, CEO of GE when GE was the centre of the management universe and ‘The Case’ – have been provided with that illusion. The in-depth case study on car manufacturing in Germany was supposed to skill you to run a family farm in Italy. I am quoting here an MBA student I know, who having been well prepared for the former was confronted with the latter at exam time.

Selling comfort

The market for business case studies is a multimillion dollar one. According to different sources, Harvard Business School Publishing alone generates approximately $200 million annually from case studies. This is old data. Theirs account for a large percentage of the market. Then you have INSEAD, HEC, LBS in Europe and many others. ‘Writing case studies’ is a sub-discipline in its own right. Still today business academics are rated and paid by the number of those cases they author. Then AI came along.

In a world which is always happy to look backwards, the case study is a self-perpetuating machinery of ‘benchmarks’ used as training tools, educational programmes, professional development ‘learning’, etc. Nothing intrinsically wrong with this but this industry has created expectations and normalized the rear mirror approach.  Not surprisingly, ‘buyers’ of professional services (anything for example on the areas of change, communications, OD/HR etc) may request ‘proof’ that ‘you dunnit’ before. ‘Can you give me ‘an example of?’ is as pervasive as the ‘you are on mute’ of Covid times.

People don’t want proof.  They want comfort. So, we ‘providers’ oblige. And comfort comes in many forms and shapes, including name dropping. The old ‘nobody ever got fired for buying IBM’ became ‘nobody ever got fired for hiring McKinsey’. In my experience, it’s not unusual to hear (with a semi apologetic tone) ‘we just have to provide comfort to the Board’. Consulting is a comfort business, and benchmarking is always a race against somebody who has already won. Marry both and you will breed sedated rear mirrors.

We usually hire the ‘you dunnit’ people, not because they are necessarily the best but because it provides immediate sedation. We hire people ‘with more than 15 years’ experience’ even if it may turn out that they have the same experience repeated 15 times.  In Herzog’s terms, we are all cowards.

I find the collective falling in love with business case studies fascinating.  As a medical doctor and psychiatrist, perhaps I shouldn’t. I have seen tons of clinical case studies and I have been reflecting on this. One of the things I can point out is that clinical cases are mostly scientific argumentation (and a great degree of detective work) in pursuit of a diagnosis or response to treatment, pointing to some conclusions (and very often ending with ‘more research is needed’).  Business case studies look more like a bad form of journalism to me.

The examples trap

They are also a trap in the vast examination room of tenders and pitches. We have achieved X in a financial services organization in Switzerland. Not relevant, we are neither financial nor Swiss.  We shaped the change of culture in a large multinational company. Good to hear but we are small. We did Y and Z in a technology company, here is the super detailed case study. Sorry, we are Public Sector. Nobody is interested in the skill set, let alone possibilities and innovation. Just a ‘whodunit it’ credential. Valium.

I have to confess that my organization has fallen into the response to tendering trap too many times, as many as we have said that we would not do it again. I deeply regret it. I am fortunate enough to work with clients who, only exceptionally, requested ‘proof’. (For the Board, you know?) As for comfort, I am sure we have been providing it for many years.

Not every film maker is a Herzog and there is nothing wrong with storyboards. Professionals build a reputation in a myriad of ways. Today, public profiles of individuals and organizations, including consulting firms, are easy to interrogate beyond simple google searches. If somebody has read everything about you in the public domain, your organization, group or individual professionals, and they love everything, but still want ‘a case’, send them the phone number of your most disliked competitor straight away.

There is nothing wrong with saying that ‘in this kind of situation we did A and we were successful’, that in this B scenario ‘we have addressed things in that way, and that we have learnt that starting with C never works’. One can show expertise in millions of ways.

A track record tells me about the past, then we extrapolate. But I would be careful with extrapolating in the current environment. Business case studies, as a window to the whole business management, are feed-back reassurance, not necessarily feed-forward reality. Can we retire rear mirror case studies and bring in feed-forward simulation and visualizations of futures?

PS: If you love the past so much, become an anthropologist.

PS2: The MBA student answering the small family farm in Italy question was me.

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Dr Leandro Herrero – Chief Organizational Architect at The Chalfont Project, Author, International Speaker and Psychiatrist. For the past 25 years, Dr Herrero and his team have been transforming culture in organizations via his pioneering Viral Change™ methodology. Follow Dr Herrero on LinkedIn for all the latest updates.

Written by: Editor