What you'll learn:
- Explain what human sustainability is and why it is a core business strategy, not an HR initiative
- Deconstruct four real business cases and identify the moves that made each one persuasive
- Apply a five-component framework to build a structured, evidence-based business case
- Translate people-focused initiatives into the financial and operational language of CFOs and boards
- Calculate the cost of inaction using three proven approaches: turnover cost, productivity delta, and risk premium
- Choose the right human sustainability lever - well-being, skills, job quality, belonging, or agency - for your specific business problem
- Build a measurement plan that keeps your initiative funded and credible after approval
- Identify and mitigate the four failure modes that cause well-intentioned people programs to collapse
- Draft a complete human-centered business case ready to present to a real decision-maker
Most people-focused initiatives fail to get approved - not because the idea is wrong, but because the argument is wrong. Leaders and managers who believe in investing in their people often find themselves unable to make that case in a language that moves decision-makers. This course changes that.
Human-Centered Business Cases is a case-led course that teaches you to build a compelling, evidence-based business case for human sustainability - the strategy of improving employee well-being, skills, job quality, belonging, and agency as a core driver of business performance.
You will study four real-world cases: a $300 billion enterprise technology company that turned a culture crisis into a competitive comeback; a global consumer goods giant with 400,000 employees that made well-being a supply chain argument; a values-led retailer that turned purpose into a retention moat; and an anonymised professional services firm that got it badly wrong - and what every leader can learn from that failure.
From these cases, you will extract a five-component business case framework that you can apply immediately in your own organisation. By the final lecture, you will have a working first draft of an actual human-centered business case - not a hypothetical.
This course is built for leaders, managers, and aspiring managers who know that how an organisation treats its people is not a soft issue. It is the business. And they are ready to prove it.
No prior knowledge of human sustainability or business case writing is required. Just bring a real problem from your organisation. This course will give you the framework, the language, and the evidence to make the argument that decision-makers cannot ignore.
