Our resources thrust participants into the heart of real-world scenarios, from crisis management in the UK during the Covid-19 pandemic to cross-party education reform in Brazil.
Many of our resources are available on The Case Centre distribution platform. Educators who are registered with the site can access free review copies of our case studies, teaching notes, and other materials.
To inquire about our other cases or background materials, please contact us at casecentre@bsg.ox.ac.uk.
Defending democracy: cybersecurity and the 2020 US elections
It was 8 November 2020, and disinformation about the 2020 presidential election was spreading rapidly. Chris Krebs, Director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) within the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS), had to decide what his team should do.
The day before, Democrat nominee Joe Biden had been declared the winner of the election, besting incumbent President Donald Trump, a Republican. But Trump refused to concede, alleging widespread voting irregularities. CISA insisted that the elections were among the most secure in recent history: since 2017 CISA had been working to enhance security and resilience of America’s election system after alleged foreign interference in the 2016 elections. During that time, CISA was able to forge relationships with thousands of local and state officials around the country to improve security of country’s outdated election infrastructure, all while gaining bipartisan respect for its apolitical approach, even as the DHS became increasingly politicised.
Despite this progress, though, Trump and his allies were now questioning the validity of the election. Disinformation was growing rampant, and Trump allies were sharing a false story about a supercomputer flipping votes. Krebs had to decide how to respond to the false claim in a way that would preserve the public’s trust in the elections and CISA’s reputation.
- Explore how to lead an organisation with a highly technical mandate in the context of deep distrust;
- Understand key principles for managing a public institution in an age of deep polarisation.
Stop and search in London in the summer of Covid
In the summer of 2020, as the Covid-19 pandemic and associated lockdown heightened tensions between London’s Metropolitan Police Service (Met) and the communities they policed, the latest data was published on the Met’s use of stop and search. The reports showed that in May alone, during the strict lockdown, the Met had conducted 44,000 searches – an eight-year high – and searched Black Londoners at four times the rate of white Londoners. Stop and search was among the most contentious police powers in the UK. Many police leaders considered it a vital tool for detecting and preventing criminal activity, yet others, including some in the police, worried it was not used fairly, with Black and minority ethnic (BAME) individuals consistently searched at higher rates than their white counterparts. And while this racial disproportionality had endured for decades, it gained renewed visibility in 2020 as Black Lives Matter protests highlighted racial discrimination in policing. Commissioner Cressida Dick, the senior-most officer of the Met responsible for more than 30,000 officers, had to respond to the growing scrutiny around stop and search. This case puts students in her shoes to consider how she can build trust with minority ethnic communities while also maintaining the trust and confidence of the Met – an overwhelmingly white institution – as well as the wider public and multiple political structures.
- Examine approaches to building trust with multiple stakeholders;
- Develop action plans that incorporate diverse, and often conflicting, views of a number of stakeholders;
- Analyse the role of academic research, experiential evidence and other data in assessing policy effectiveness along social and political lines.
Should I really be doing this? Misba Khan’s journey to the North Pole
Misba Khan, a 48-year-old, Pakistani-British woman, had to overcome several challenges to join the Women’s Euro-Arabian North Pole Expedition. Khan described herself as ‘an ordinary person who does a nine-to-five job and a mum’ with limited hiking – and no skiing –experience. She found the expedition training extremely daunting. When faced with a teammate returning home and the task of navigating the group across arctic ice, Khan had to decide: would she forge ahead or turn around?
This case study follows Misba Khan, a 48-year-old, Pakistani-British woman, as she prepares to ski the last degree to the North Pole with the Women’s Euro-Arabian North Pole Expedition (WEANPE). The WEANPE sought to bring together a diverse group of 12 women from across Europe and the Middle East for the challenging Arctic expedition, with the dual aim of fostering cross-cultural dialogue and inspiring other women to forge into new frontiers. The case is set in September 2016 at the first training expedition in Iceland as Misba tries to find her place on the team. Prior to arriving, Misba had invested a good deal of effort in building necessary skills, such as becoming a strong swimmer, but she was still inexperienced in many areas, having never lit a camping stove, nor erected a tent, nor put on a pair of skis. Now, during the expedition, she is thriving at certain aspects of the training but struggling with others. The skiing has pushed her to the edge of her endurance and she has found herself connecting with only one of her teammates, Fatima, as the other teammates are somewhat younger and more experienced than she is. When Misba receives the unexpected news that Fatima was leaving the expedition for good, Misba needed to decide if she would keep going.
- Learn best practices to deal with difficult challenges;
- Apply learnings to be better contributors and leaders of diverse teams;
- Reflect on what success means to a team and to an individual, and plan decisions accordingly;
- Communicate difficult decisions in a team context.