Business Case in Complex system

• Why Business Case does not fit in a Complex System
  • Cause and effect are only understood in hindsight (retrospective coherence)
  • Outcomes emerge from interactions, feedback loops, and learning, not linear planning
  • Business case demands forecasting benefits, costs, and risks upfront which cannot be reliably known
  • Business case ignores unknown unknowns
    • What you don’t know is what you don’t know so you can’t include it in the analysis
  • Example: Launching a community engagement initiative or experimenting with new organizational culture practices

• In the complex system, reframe Business Case as a Value Proposition
  • Value proposition is more appropriate since customer perception, culture, and market dynamics are emergent and dispositional
  • Apply abductive reasoning rather than inductive
  • Define a hypotheses or play a hunch instead of outcomes
  • Allocate bounded resources for experimentation
  • Monitor learning and adaptability using narrative data rather than measure financial return with big data
    
  • This shifts the business case from a predictive tool to a sense-making scaffold