What is Brinkerhoff's Success Case Method?

Managing a team involves a constant stream of decisions and investments. You spend your limited time and resources on new software, leadership training, or process improvements because you want your venture to thrive. However, a common fear for many business owners is the uncertainty of whether these investments actually work. It is stressful to see a project finish without knowing if it truly empowered your staff or if it was just another task on their busy plates. Standard metrics often focus on averages, but averages frequently hide the very information you need to make better decisions .

Brinkerhoff’s Success Case Method , often called SCM, offers a different way to look at your business performance. Instead of looking for a generic middle ground, it asks you to look at the extremes. It is an evaluation approach that focuses on finding and analyzing the most and least successful cases of a program. By studying the people who excelled and those who struggled, you can uncover the practical reality of how work gets done in your organization. This method helps you move past marketing fluff and get to the core of what is happening on the ground.

Core principles of the Success Case Method

The foundation of SCM is built on two simple questions. First, what is the best that could happen? Second, why is it not happening for everyone? Robert Brinkerhoff designed this method to be fast and practical for busy managers who do not have time for massive scientific studies. The goal is not to prove that a program worked in a statistical sense, but to understand the factors that contributed to its success or failure.

This method typically involves two distinct phases:

• A broad survey to identify the outliers in a group.
• In depth interviews with the most successful and least successful individuals.

By focusing on these specific groups, you can identify the exact behaviors, tools, or environmental factors that lead to high performance. It allows you to see the real world challenges your team faces that might be invisible from a high level management perspective.

Why the Success Case Method helps busy managers

As a manager, you are often navigating a complex environment where everyone else seems to have more experience or better data. SCM gives you a way to gain confidence through qualitative insights. It validates your intuition with stories and facts from your own team. This approach is particularly useful because it highlights the barriers to success that exist within your own company culture or workflows.

When you use SCM, you are looking for specific evidence of impact. You might discover that your top performers succeeded because they found a workaround for a broken process. Or, you might find that your least successful employees failed because they lacked a simple piece of information that was never shared. These are practical, actionable insights that you can use to build a more solid and remarkable business.

Comparing SCM to traditional ROI metrics

Traditional Return on Investment calculations often try to boil down employee development into a single dollar figure. While this sounds professional, it often misses the nuances of human behavior and organizational complexity. SCM and ROI serve different purposes in a manager’s toolkit.

• ROI tells you the what, such as whether a program was profitable.
• SCM tells you the why, such as why a program was or was not profitable.
• ROI looks at the average performance of the entire group.
• SCM looks at the high performers to see what is possible and the low performers to see what is blocked.

For a manager who cares deeply about empowering their team, SCM is often more valuable. It provides a roadmap for improvement rather than just a final grade on a report card. It acknowledges that your team is made of people with different strengths and challenges.

Scenarios for applying the Success Case Method

You can apply SCM to almost any change you implement in your business. It is especially effective when the stakes are high and you need to know exactly how to support your team. Consider using this method in the following situations:

• After implementing a new project management system to see why some departments are faster than others.
• Following a sales training program to understand what the top sellers are doing differently.
• When a new hybrid work policy is introduced to see who is most productive and why.
• After a customer service workshop to identify the specific phrases or actions that lead to five star reviews.

Using SCM in these scenarios allows you to replicate success across the entire organization. It helps you de-stress because you are no longer guessing about what works. You have clear, straightforward descriptions of success that you can use to guide your team.

Addressing the unknowns in your business

Every business has hidden strengths and weaknesses. SCM is a tool for surfacing those unknowns so you can think through them clearly. It encourages you to ask hard questions about your management style and the environment you have created. Are you accidentally rewarding the wrong behaviors? Are there systemic hurdles that make it impossible for some people to succeed despite their best efforts?

By leaning into these questions, you show your team that you are committed to their growth and the long term health of the venture. You are not looking for a get rich quick scheme. You are looking to build something solid and impactful. What could you learn today if you sat down with your most successful employee and your least successful one? The answers might be the key to your next major breakthrough.

Related Reading

• Moving Beyond the Harvard Case Study: The Rise of Micro-Cases for Busy Teams
• Selling the Business Case: Solving the ROI Calculator Clumsiness
• What is Return on Learning (ROL)?
• What is the Case Study Method?
• Beyond the Binder: Moving from Long Case Studies to Micro Cases