No.11, May 2022. The challenging task of balancing synchronous with asynchronous teaching is not going to go away with the eventual end of the Covid-19 pandemic, and we now have a “4-S framework” to facilitate this balancing act. The creator of 4-S, whose letters mean struggle, structure, systematize and synthesize (struggle, structure, systematize, synthesize), is Robert D. Austin professor at Ivey Business School, which is emerging as the school with the greatest adherence to the case method.
The 4-S should not be confused with the 7-S framework, popularized by Peters & Waterman in In Search of Excellence (1982, In search of excellence) and widely applied by the management consulting firm McKinsey in the diagnosis of companies. The 4-S, on the other hand, is a framework for case method instructors, especially with synchronous sessions and asynchronous activities.
This framework is certainly useful in guiding the discussion of cases, but it must be applied with caution. Let's go in parts, starting with stream (struggle), the first “S”: Let students struggle with a new, unstructured situation. But we must distinguish between the fight that makes the person grow and the unnecessary fight, which only produces frustration.
For this reason I do not agree with Robert Austin's recommendation to "use mini-cases that contain too much (or too little) information, as examples." The cases should not be used as examples or illustrations; These are situations that, because they are real, are sufficiently complex without adding elements of little relevance, especially when teaching is remote and not face-to-face.
The second "S" is structure. After wrestling with the ambiguities of the situation, the student needs to order the facts into what Austin calls "categorization." It's something we do when we prepare a case, but it's mechanical; columns on sheets of paper or spaces on the plan of blackboards. We can, for example, use the 7-S framework: what do we know about strategy, structure, systems, style, skills (skills), staff (people) and shared values (shared values) of the organization we are analyzing?
There comes the third “S”: systematize the information already categorized, “guiding the students” to connect the dots. As a starting point, Austin proposes to rescue the topics that come out of the asynchronous discussions. Systematization is an essential step; the risk is over-guiding and not allowing students to find their own paths.
The riskiest step, however, is the fourth and last: synthesize (synthesize), to “establish consensus and draw conclusions” because students sometimes confuse the difference—which is fundamental—between the message (the take aways, which is very clear to them) and the “answer” of the case.
The 4-S framework proposed by Robert Austin can be useful in discussing the cases, but remember that it is based on the same experiential learning model and philosophy developed by David Kolb and his associates: having an experience (the case), reflect, learn from it and test what has been learned.
This same sequence of steps can be seen in the Harvard Business School case analysis models in integrative negotiation (Fisher & Ury, Ogliastri et al) and Design Thinking (Brown, Cardoza et al). It begins with an understanding of the environment and people, focuses on purpose, explores alternatives and options; evaluates and selects among the best, makes prototypes and tests them.
