The method began in a law school. In the 1870s Christopher Columbus Langdell, dean of Harvard Law School, stopped lecturing students on legal principles and started handing them real disputes to reason through. Business schools borrowed the idea decades later. Medicine has its own version in the case presentation, where a clinician walks colleagues through a patient they had to make calls about.
A courtroom dispute, a company decision and a patient on a ward have almost nothing in common as subjects. What they share is a shape. And once you can see the shape, you start noticing that cases are everywhere — including in your own week.
Five things every real case has
Strip away the subject matter and a case is any situation with these five properties. If one is missing, what you have is something else — a story, a procedure, a quiz.
1. A real situation, at a specific moment
Not "managing change" in general, but this team, this Monday, this email that has just arrived. Cases are concrete. Abstractions are what you draw out of them afterwards.
2. Someone who has to act
A chair to sit in. The person whose problem it is, with their own constraints, history and things to lose. You reason about a case from inside one person's position, not from above it.
3. A genuine tension
Reasonable people would disagree about what to do. If there is an obvious right answer, you are looking at a test with extra paragraphs.
4. Incomplete information
You have to decide before you know everything — which is what every real decision is like, and what classroom exercises usually pretend away.
5. Something at stake
Getting it wrong costs something: money, a relationship, a reputation, an opportunity. Stakes are what make the tension matter.
The useful part. Nothing on that list mentions a company, an industry or a business school. If a situation has all five, it is a case — whether or not anyone has ever written it up.
By that test, your next interview is a case
Take something most people have faced: a job interview next Thursday. Run it through the five and every one of them is there.
| The test | In a job interview |
|---|---|
| A specific moment | A final-stage panel, 10am Thursday, for one role at one employer. |
| Someone who acts | You — with your own CV, your own gaps and your own reasons for wanting it. |
| A genuine tension | The advert wants five years of something you have done for three. Do you lean into the gap or steer round it? Good candidates genuinely disagree. |
| Incomplete information | You do not know who will be on the panel, what they are really assessing, or what the last candidate said. |
| Stakes | The job, obviously — but also the salary you will anchor on, and how you will feel walking out. |
It is the same for a lot of ordinary working life. The price rise you have been putting off telling your biggest client about. The conversation with a team member whose performance has slipped since a hard few months at home. The funding pitch next month where you already know which slide they will pick apart. Each of them is a situation, a person who has to act, a real tension, missing information and something to lose.
None of these would ever make it into a business school's catalogue. All of them are cases.
What isn't a case
The definition is only useful if it rules things out, so here is what does not qualify.
- A procedure with one right answer. How to process a refund or file an expense claim is training. It is valuable, but there is nothing to argue about.
- A story that has already been resolved. "How we turned the business around" told with hindsight is a success story. The decision has been made for you and the tension is gone. A case stops at the moment before anyone knows how it ends.
- A quiz in disguise. If the whole exercise exists to check whether you can spot the correct option, it is an assessment. As we have argued before, a case that has acquired a correct answer has stopped being a case.
Why it is worth treating your own situation as one
Here is the part that is useful whether or not you ever use a case platform.
When people prepare for something difficult on their own, they rehearse their own lines. They polish the answer to the question they expect, or the opening of the conversation they are dreading. What they almost never do is write down the other side properly: who is in the room, what each of those people actually wants, and what they know that you do not.
Writing a situation up as a case forces exactly that. You cannot describe the tension without stating both sides of it. You cannot name what is at stake without admitting what you are worried about. Most preparation fails not because people practise the wrong answers, but because they never wrote down the question from the other person's point of view.
And once it is written as a case, it can be played. The panel asks the follow-up you were hoping to avoid. The client pushes back on the price rise. You find out where your argument is thin in a rehearsal, rather than on the day.
Elite institutions have taught people this way for a century and a half because it works. The only thing that was ever exclusive about it was the folder.
Turn your own situation into a case
CaseConduit's AuthorLab opens with templates for exactly these. Job & Interview Prep takes your CV and the job advert. The Startup Stress-Test takes your deck. There are others for a difficult workplace conversation, a legal matter, or a classic teaching case. Each one asks the questions that make it a case, hands you a document already built around your answers — and then lets you play it as a live simulation, with characters who push back.