I use a wide range of case studies in workshops and consultancy. They can be really helpful in demonstrating real-world scenarios, exceptional strategies or choices, poor decision-making and disruption. But there’s a problem that we don’t talk enough about.
Some leaders and executives want to focus (and sometimes insist) on using only sector-specific case studies that come from the industry that their business is in. Financial businesses want financial company examples, travel want travel business examples, pharmaceutical companies only want to see pharma case studies.
The belief, I guess, is that showing sector-relevant case studies helps executives to see examples that they can relate to. Perhaps it’s about reflecting the unique contexts of an industry and looking at examples that feel more ‘real’.
This may be useful in situations where a business is looking to understand what sector best practice looks like. Where the brief is specifically about learning what’s good in the industry and who’s doing interesting things.
But the issue is that frequently the need is for more than this. Executives often want to be inspired to think differently, to be challenged with novel approaches or ideas that can potentially generate an unfair advantage over their competitors.
And that won’t come from looking at what your competitors are doing. Nobody ever came up with a ground-breaking idea by looking at best practice in their own sector. Nobody ever gained a unique competitive advantage by copying what others are doing in the same industry. Far better in this context to use a bit of imagination and look at examples from beyond your own sector and consider what could happen if that was applied in your own business (sidenote – this is my all time favourite example of this).
The other issue can be that when you use sector-relevant examples what often happens is that it is viewed through a uniquely competitive lens – ‘only they can do this because of X’, or ‘we can’t do that because of Y’. It’s all very ‘yes but’, which is not very helpful.
The key here is understanding what the purpose of using the case studies is, when sector-relevant case studies are required to show what’s going on in an industry and when the ask is much bigger or different. But I know that generally, my preference is always to challenge executives to break out of norms and to genuinely think differently about how they can create value within their sector.
Photo by Alexander Grey on Unsplash
I write a weekly Substack of digital trends, transformation insights and quirkiness. To join our community of thousands of subscribers you can sign up to that here.
To get posts like this delivered straight to your inbox, drop your email into the box below
Leave a Reply