Services
CASE Strategy Framework
How you can make the hard parts of strategy much easier, and get consistently better resiults.
Help your strategy gather momentum, not gather dust
CASE is an open, flexible and visual framework for any team to formulate and communicate strategy more effectively.
You don’t have to suffer these problems anymore:
- Unproductive offsites and other strategy meetings, with nothing to show for all the talk
- Spending way too long making strategy decks that are hard to get feedback on, understand, and remember... let alone activate
- Not enough alignment with decision-makers and stakeholders
What makes the CASE Strategy Framework different
It’s open
CASE actively involves people in your strategy outside of the traditional leadership roles, for better accuracy and buy-in.
It’s smart
CASE makes the toughest parts of strategy easier: aligning on a vision, defining success, and prioritising objectives.
It’s visual
CASE gets everyone using visual frameworks for better clarity, precision and efficiency in strategic conversations.
CASE was created by Maureen Thurston, and has been refined and adapted by various design consultants for different use cases. The Bright Pilots adaptation puts emphasis on visualising strategy, as well as turning it from being a product you need to ‘sell’ to your organisation, to being a process that everyone can embrace.
How CASE works
Context
Where are we now?
The first stage of the CASE Strategy Framework is all about establishing the context in which the strategy sits, and seeks an answer to the main question: where are we now? It has three major pieces to it, and each piece has an accompanying visual framework: Retrospective, Analysis, and Framing. Each piece can be a strategic meeting on its own, or you can combine them as one Context Workshop, anywhere from 1 hour to 1 day, depending on the scale and complexity involved.
Main questions to answer
- What have we learned? It makes sense to take the best of what a team has learned together through working together, using a retrospective framework, such as this Reflection Canvas.
- What are our greatest insights and opportunities? - Here’s where you can use whatever analysis methods you need — such as SWOT analysis, competitor analysis, Porter’s Five Forces, Balanced Scorecard — to know where to focus and guide the rest of the strategy.
- What problem are we setting out to solve? - We are very big on this part! Articulating the main problem or challenge to be solved is a surefire way to set up your strategic discussions for better success.
Main outputs
- Insights and opportunities
- Problem statement
Aspiration
Where do we need to be?
The second stage of the CASE Strategy Framework sets up a future vision that the strategy will help you to achieve. Rather than getting hung up on a vision statement, a mission statement, or anything in between, this strategic discussion focuses on answering the questions: what would success look like, and how would we measure that?
We have found that articulating measurable success in terms of direction and level of ambition is much more effective. This also helps groups to not get prematurely hung up on specific solutions that they may or may not think are already achievable. In this stage, we also map the system of your strategy, whether it’s for your leadership team, product, service, change program, policy development... you name it.
An Aspiration Workshop uses the outputs of the Context stage as inputs, and can take anywhere from 1 hour to 1 day, depending on the scale and complexity involved, and the number of stakeholders you would like to involve.
Main questions to answer
- What does success look like? We have a nuber of visual frameworks and interactive group activities for this, including the Future Thank You Speech Canvas.
- What is our vision? - If your team or organisation does not already have this, we help you define, refine and align on your vision — a statement of what you see the world looking like in future.
- What does the world lose if we don’t show up? - This is a great question to discuss, to ensure your vision statement is specific and relevant, rather than fluffy, vague and too ‘marketing buzz-word’-heavy.
Main outputs
- Sucess metric(s) and target(s)
- Success statement
Solution
What will get us there?
This is the stage that makes most strategies fail, because a lot of teams just replace it with hope, and as Richard Rumelt (author of Good Strategy Bad Strategy) says, “hope is not a strategy”. Essentially, we help teams articulate where to play and how to win.
In this stage, we use a wide range of creative brainstorming activities to help teams formulate what is their unique value proposition and/or competitive differentiators. And rather than creating lots of slides, wherever possible we help a team make a prototype that shows how success can be achieved. The nature of the prototype of course varies on the strategy itself, ranging from business model, to change strategy, to product or service strategy, to marketing strategy.
Making and showing, rather than telling and selling, helps a team to define, refine and align on what will best achieve the success defined in the Aspiration stage much more effectively.
Main questions to answer
- Where do we play?
- How do we win, with what differentiator?
- What can we make to show this?
Main outputs
- Prototype(s)
Execution
How will we do it?
Strategy is nothing if not executed well. In this fourth stage, we develop the strategic narrative that has been built throughout this process — the problem statement, the success statement, the solution — and help teams to work out how do get the soution done.
By building a strategic narrative together throughout the whole process, risks have been identified, and stakeholders have been brought in for discussions along the way, so that defining, refining and aligning on a set of objectives is much smoother.
This stage also works well for whatever project or program methodology a team is using, e.g. Scrum, Lean (or other mix of Agile methods), PRINCE2, 6Sigma, PMBOK, or Waterfall.
Main questions to answer
- What would stop us from doing this now?
- What people, processes and capabilities do we need?
- What are our objectives and results indicators?
Main outputs
- Strategic objectives
- Project roadmap
We’ve been in a lot of meeting rooms and boardrooms...
Here are some organisations that Bright Pilots has been privileged to facilitate for:
What you can expect
What works well for one organisation probably won’t work well for another. We pride ourselves in attuning our approach to your context and culture, and adapting the best workshop methods available to suit your outcomes. Rely on us to:
- Co-design the agenda with you
- Set your team and stakeholders up for success beforehand
- Establish a fun, safe, equitable culture
- Release more of people’s potential for creativity, critical thinking, empathy and listening
- Improvise and adapt when needed
- Capture and synthesise the outputs of our time together
Other services
Dive into the other services we offer, either as part of our facilitation and strategy service, or separately.
Visualisation
We turn complexity into clarity, and increase your audience’s engagement with illustrations, strategy maps and diagrams, live scribing, and other visual communications.
Coaching
We help your team work better together by using our very own innovation performance coaching program as a way for them to solve a current challenge, and pitch the solution to their leadership.
Training
We build your organisation’s capabilities in ‘21st Century’ skills that are crucial for work now, and for what’s next, including strategy, facilitation, and visualisation.
Ben had fabulous discernment in making sure everyone’s voice was heard. He wasn’t afraid to notice someone stewing on an idea and asking the right questions to help solidify. Really well done!.
Rachel Patricks, Compassion Australia
Working with Ben Crothers was an absolute joy from start to finish. As part of his work with us, Ben ran a brand exploration session for us, really encouraging the team to think hard about who we wanted this new brand to be, what its values are and how we want to make people feel as well as think when they engage with us. I highly recommend him.
Director, WorkForClimate
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