Scaleco

Case study

Executive Summary

ScaleCo, a market survey and insights company, faced the challenge of scaling its operations and remaining competitive in a rapidly evolving industry increasingly shaped by technology and artificial intelligence. Despite over a decade of operations, ScaleCo relied on traditional, manual processes, which limited its ability to scale and compete with larger, more technologically advanced players. To address these challenges, ScaleCo adopted WTF (WhatTheForesight) to assess its current capabilities, identify areas of misalignment, and guide its transformation into a future-ready organization.

The initial deployment of WTF involved a management-level proof-of-concept study, which revealed critical insights into leadership alignment, organizational gaps, and the need for technological integration. Perception data highlighted strong confidence in the leadership team’s vision and values, with future scores showing a promising trajectory. However, significant gaps were identified in team effectiveness, business model modernization, experimentation, and governance—areas essential for ensuring ScaleCo’s long-term competitiveness.

Additionally, WTF’s demographic segmentation revealed disparities in perceptions across gender and racial demographics. Female employees scored the company lower on current metrics but demonstrated optimism for the future, while Black respondents showed higher confidence in ScaleCo’s future trajectory than other racial groups. These findings provided ScaleCo with actionable insights to enhance inclusivity, strengthen its culture, and ensure alignment across all levels of the organization.

WTF also enabled ScaleCo to benchmark its performance against peer organizations within a learning cohort. Comparative analysis revealed unique strengths, such as ScaleCo’s vision and technology adoption, and highlighted opportunities to learn from peers excelling in areas like agility and culture. This peer-driven approach fostered collaborative learning and allowed ScaleCo to identify strategies for growth and innovation.

As a result of these insights, ScaleCo expanded the use of WTF across its entire workforce, aiming to align perceptions and drive a unified strategy for the future. By addressing gaps in organizational metrics and leveraging best practices from its learning cohort, ScaleCo positioned itself to modernize its business model, integrate cutting-edge technologies, and compete more effectively in a disrupted industry.

Key Insights from the ScaleCo Case Study:

WTF provided a comprehensive assessment of ScaleCo’s current and future readiness, highlighting actionable gaps and opportunities.
The tool’s demographic insights revealed critical cultural and inclusivity challenges, offering a roadmap for strengthening internal alignment.
Peer benchmarking within a learning cohort enabled collaborative growth and best practice sharing, enhancing ScaleCo’s innovation capacity.
Insights from WTF led to significant revisions of ScaleCo’s business model, driving its transformation into a tech-enabled, customer-centric organization.
ScaleCo’s commitment to WTF demonstrated the tool’s value as a strategic resource for navigating complex transitions and sustaining growth.

Through its engagement with WTF, ScaleCo demonstrated how foresight tools can empower organizations to build resilience, foster innovation, and ensure future readiness in a competitive landscape. This case exemplifies the critical role of WTF in aligning strategy with actionable insights to achieve sustainable success.

Client Overview: Scaleco

ScaleCo operates in the traditional market survey and insights industry, relying heavily on manual processes, such as pen-and-paper surveys and in-person polling, conducted by research teams. Despite over a decade in operation, ScaleCo remains one of the smaller players in a space increasingly dominated by larger competitors who have embraced technology to automate data collection and analysis. This technological adoption has allowed these competitors to scale operations, improve efficiency, and generate higher profitability—creating a reinforcing cycle of growth and impact that smaller players like ScaleCo struggle to match.

Engagement with WTF

ScaleCo initially engaged with WTF (WhatTheForesight) to explore philosophies around innovation, seeking strategies to expand its portfolio of innovative products and solutions. However, this initial discussion quickly evolved into a broader conversation about ScaleCo’s internal capabilities, skills, and readiness to embrace innovation as a core part of its business model. Recognizing the rapid disruption brought by emerging technologies—particularly artificial intelligence—ScaleCo aimed to understand its current state of preparedness and identify pathways to scale its operations effectively.

As a smaller, more agile organization with less bureaucracy, ScaleCo sought to leverage WTF both as a diagnostic tool to evaluate its operating model and as a potential framework to develop innovative, white-labeled solutions for its clients. The company saw WTF not only as a means to assess its internal capabilities but also as an opportunity to create unique, tech-enabled services that could position it as a competitive player against larger, more technologically advanced rivals.

Initial Deployment and Methodology

The initial deployment of WTF at ScaleCo involved a proof-of-concept study with a sample size of six participants, drawn primarily from the management team. While this was a relatively small sample compared to the company’s overall workforce of approximately 20, the initial results provided valuable directional data about the organization’s perceptions and strategic alignment. This approach demonstrated that even with limited participation, WTF could generate actionable insights, offering a critical advantage for organizations with constraints on time, resources, or survey participation rates.

This highlights an important consideration for organizations navigating the balance between academic rigor and practical relevance. From a purely scientific perspective, statistical significance often requires large sample sizes, sometimes representing 70–80% of an organization, depending on the confidence interval and margin of error required. However, achieving such participation rates is rarely feasible in a corporate context, where survey completion rates typically fall below 50%, even with incentives. WTF bridges this gap by prioritizing speed, relevance, and directional accuracy over absolute statistical precision, making it a practical tool for real-world corporate environments.

Key Insights from the Initial Analysis

WTF’s analysis surfaced a number of insights about ScaleCo’s operations and market positioning. While these findings may not have been entirely surprising to the leadership team, they reinforced the CEO’s growing awareness that ScaleCo’s current business model was increasingly out of sync with evolving market conditions. The results highlighted a clear need for innovation and adaptation to ensure the organization’s relevance and future fitness in a rapidly changing industry.

Notably, the analysis revealed a disconnect between ScaleCo’s historical practices and the demands of the modern market. This surfaced both through the responses from the management team and the broader perception within the organization. While some of these findings echoed ongoing internal discussions about the need for change, WTF provided a structured framework to move beyond theoretical acknowledgment of the issues to actionable insights, fostering a clearer pathway for transformation.

By demonstrating its effectiveness in this initial deployment, WTF not only validated its role as a diagnostic tool for ScaleCo’s leadership but also positioned itself as a strategic resource for guiding future innovation and operational shifts.

The WTF analysis of ScaleCo presented a holistic view of the organization’s perceived trajectory, offering both encouraging insights and areas requiring focused attention. Graphically, the data revealed that the organization is trending in the right direction, with future ratings (orange curve) consistently outpacing present ratings (blue curve). This upward trajectory suggests a growing belief among respondents that ScaleCo is positioning itself for future success. However, the analysis also highlighted critical areas of improvement necessary to sustain this momentum.

Leadership Insights

The leadership domain emerged as a relative strength for ScaleCo. The current leadership scored an average of 7.47, with a significant projected increase to 9.07 in the future. This substantial improvement underscores strong confidence in the executive and management team’s ability to guide ScaleCo forward. Within the leadership metrics, Vision and Values stood out as a key strength, reflecting alignment and clarity in the organization’s future direction.

However, the data pointed to an area for improvement: the effectiveness of the team. The metric “How would you rate your current team?” scored 6.8 today, with a future projection of 9.2. This 2.4-point delta is significant, signalling that while the team is perceived as having high potential, current capabilities require investment to align with future strategic demands. While WTF does not prescribe specific interventions, it provides a directional lens for ScaleCo’s leadership to investigate skill gaps, teamwork dynamics, and resource allocation to bridge this gap effectively.

Organizational Metrics

The organizational bucket presented the most significant opportunity for improvement, with an average score of 5.9 today, projected to rise to 8.33 in the future. The analysis revealed notable gaps across most metrics, with three key attributes emerging as priorities:

Business Model
ScaleCo’s current business model, rooted in traditional market insights practices, requires transformation to remain competitive. A shift toward a technology-enabled, AI-driven approach would allow for scalable, efficient data acquisition and deeper insights at reduced costs and time.
Experimentation
Respondents indicated that ScaleCo needs to enhance its capacity for experimentation. To stay future-fit, the organization must foster a culture of innovation, encouraging rapid prototyping and testing of new ideas to remain responsive to market demands.
Governance
Governance structures emerged as an area of concern. Today, ScaleCo lacks the robust frameworks necessary to support a digital-first business model. Respondents acknowledged that future operations, particularly those reliant on technology and data, would require stronger governance to ensure compliance with standards like data privacy and security regulations (e.g., POPIA).

These findings collectively underscore the need for ScaleCo to modernize its operations and processes to support its ambitious growth goals.

Landscape Metrics

The landscape metrics demonstrated relative strength, with an average score of 6.64 today, projected to rise to 9.03 in the future. While this indicates optimism, several attributes within this category demand strategic attention:

Industry Disruption and Speed: ScaleCo must adapt to the high pace of disruption in its industry. Scores in these areas, improving from approximately 6 to 9, highlight the need for a 50% improvement to align its business model with future industry dynamics.
Ecosystem Integration: The ecosystem metric also revealed a significant gap, moving from 6 to 9.1. For ScaleCo to compete effectively against larger players, it must build stronger alliances and partnerships, creating a systems-based approach that not only enhances value delivery but positions ScaleCo as an integral part of its industry’s ecosystem.

Overall, the WTF analysis painted a promising yet challenging picture for ScaleCo. While the organization’s leadership and vision are perceived as moving in the right direction, substantial work is required to modernize its business model, foster innovation, and strengthen governance structures. The findings offer a clear roadmap for ScaleCo to invest in team development, embrace technological transformation, and establish itself as a competitive, future-ready player in the market insights industry.

Demographic Insights: Gender and Race Perspectives

In addition to evaluating organizational perceptions across 25 attributes, WTF collects demographic data to enable deeper segmentation and analytical capabilities. These demographic insights provide ScaleCo with an opportunity to uncover nuanced trends within its workforce and identify areas for targeted interventions.

Gender-Based Perceptions

One significant demographic trend revealed by WTF relates to gender. The orange curve represents the overall perceptions of the company, as previously discussed, while the blue curve illustrates responses from individuals who identified as female. The data shows that female respondents consistently scored ScaleCo lower across most attributes compared to the broader organization.

This divergence could indicate a variety of underlying issues. Female employees at ScaleCo may feel less optimistic about the organization’s current state due to challenges such as underrepresentation at senior levels, a lack of recognition for their contributions, or potential biases embedded in workplace practices. However, when examining future perceptions, female respondents demonstrated a shift, with their scores not only normalizing but, in some instances, surpassing the organization-wide average.

This progression from more pessimistic to more optimistic future perceptions suggests that female employees may have growing confidence in the company’s potential to improve its culture and operations over time. For ScaleCo, this presents an opportunity to explore the root causes of the initial dissonance and take proactive steps to address these challenges. Efforts could include fostering gender diversity in leadership roles, creating equitable recognition programs, and ensuring an inclusive culture where female employees feel valued and supported.

Race-Based Perceptions

Another notable trend identified in the demographic data pertains to race. WTF captured responses across three primary racial demographics – a particularly useful, albeit potential controversial analysis in South Afriica. The analysis revealed that while there is little variance in current ratings among these groups, differences emerge when evaluating future perceptions. Respondents identifying as Black showed a more optimistic outlook for ScaleCo’s prospects compared to other racial demographics.

This optimism among Black respondents could stem from a perception that ScaleCo is addressing diversity and inclusion in its future strategies or perhaps reflects a broader confidence in the organization’s leadership and. Conversely, it may indicate areas where other racial demographics feel less included direction (as it is the biggest demographic of respondees) or aligned with the company’s evolving vision.

These demographic insights highlight opportunities for ScaleCo to better understand and address disparities in perception among its workforce. By investigating the drivers behind these differences, ScaleCo can create a more inclusive environment and ensure its strategies resonate across all employee groups.

For example:

Gender Disparities: ScaleCo could explore initiatives to enhance female representation in leadership, develop mentorship programs, and provide targeted career advancement opportunities.
Racial Perspectives: Further analysis could help identify and address any barriers to inclusivity, ensuring that ScaleCo’s vision and actions align with the expectations of all racial demographics.

Leveraging these insights, ScaleCo can enhance employee engagement, strengthen its organizational culture, and position itself as a more equitable and forward-thinking organization. This deeper segmentation capability of WTF proves invaluable, providing not only a diagnostic lens but also actionable insights to improve ScaleCo’s future fitness and operational success.

Peer Learning and Benchmarking: Insights from ScaleCo and Its Cohort

As a scale-up organization, ScaleCo has surpassed the stages of proof-of-concept, prototype development, and initial revenue generation, operating successfully in the marketplace for over a decade. However, like many companies of its size, revenue, and employee count, ScaleCo faces common challenges associated with scaling operations, sustaining growth, and maintaining competitiveness. To address these challenges, ScaleCo’s executive team participates in a learning cohort with similarly positioned organizations, creating a platform for peer-driven insights and shared best practices.

Comparative Analysis with Cohort Peer

Within the cohort, ScaleCo was benchmarked against a peer organization of comparable size and maturity. A comparative analysis of their respective perception curves—ScaleCo (grey curve) and its peer (pink curve)—revealed distinct strengths and opportunities for mutual learning:

Strengths and Knowledge Sharing
- ScaleCo’s Strengths: ScaleCo demonstrated significant strengths in Vision and Values as well as its use of technology. These attributes suggest a well-articulated strategic direction and investments in technology that enhance operational efficiency and customer relevance.
- Peer’s Strengths: The peer organization excelled in Mindset, Culture, and Agility, showcasing an entrepreneurial approach and the ability to navigate uncertainty effectively.

By pairing these two organizations, ScaleCo and its peer can exchange insights to strengthen each other’s weaker areas. For example, ScaleCo can share best practices in technology investment and customer-centric strategies, while the peer organization can provide guidance on fostering an adaptive culture and navigating unknown market dynamics.

Overlap and Broader Insights
Beyond their individual strengths, the analysis highlighted additional areas of overlap and divergence:
- ScaleCo’s Opportunities for Growth: Attributes such as Ecosystem Alignment and Customer Value Add emerged as areas where ScaleCo can further refine its approach to expand its influence and relevance within its market.
- Peer’s Opportunities for Growth: The peer organization could benefit from ScaleCo’s expertise in creating a strong vision, investing in the right technologies, and enhancing customer-centricity to drive long-term value.

Facilitating Broader Cohort Insights

The value of the peer learning program extends beyond individual pairings. Facilitators of the cohort program can analyze a larger sample size of participating organizations to identify collective strengths and challenges. For example, some companies may excel in governance or experimentation, while others lead in strategic alignment or agile methodologies. By aggregating and sharing these insights with the entire cohort, facilitators can amplify the value of peer learning, enabling all participants to benefit from a broader pool of expertise.

This example underscores the transformative potential of peer learning for scale-up organizations. By benchmarking against equitably positioned peers, companies like ScaleCo gain access to actionable insights, practical tools, and shared strategies that directly address their unique challenges. Additionally, fostering collaboration within a structured cohort allows organizations to accelerate growth, enhance resilience, and sustain competitive advantages in an ever-changing business environment.

Determining perception across a heterogeneous grouping

WTF was deployed at an international consulting company to evaluate a leadership development program for mid-to-senior-level management. The program, called the Director’s Path, targeted two distinct cohorts of approximately 30 participants each, conducted six months apart. Importantly, these cohorts were heterogeneous, with no prior interaction between participants in different functions and levels.

The results, illustrated in the accompanying graph, show striking similarities in the perception curves of the two cohorts, particularly the blue curve, which represents the company’s current state. This consistent alignment across two separate groups provides a powerful insight: both cohorts experience and perceive the company in almost identical ways. This uniformity validates WTF’s ability to reliably gauge the pressing issues within the organization, offering the management team a quick and actionable understanding of the company’s current challenges.

Implications for Learning Cohorts

The insights gained from this use case align with the learning cohort model highlighted earlier. WTF’s capability to compare perceptions over time or across different groups provides an invaluable tool for tracking organizational development, both at the individual company level and within a broader cohort. By aggregating data across multiple organizations, facilitators of a learning cohort can identify trends, benchmark performance, and determine whether participants are progressing positively or encountering shared challenges.

For individual organizations, WTF allows management teams to implement targeted interventions based on cohort feedback, ensuring that areas requiring improvement are addressed promptly. For the collective, this shared learning approach fosters growth opportunities across the cohort and encourages a more collaborative environment where best practices and solutions can be exchanged effectively.

ScaleCo’s Commitment to WTF Insights

ScaleCo, having experienced the value of WTF firsthand, has embraced the tool as a pre-indicator of its potential future trajectory. As indicated by the original orange curve, WTF identified the significant gaps between ScaleCo’s current state and its desired future. This insight has motivated ScaleCo to implement substantial revisions to its business model and expand the use of WTF to include the entire organization, beyond the management team.

to its business model and expand the use of WTF to include the entire organization, beyond the management team.

By rolling out WTF to the full workforce, ScaleCo seeks to determine whether perceptions align across different organizational levels, from senior leadership to broader employee groups. This segmentation of data enables ScaleCo to identify potential dissonance between teams, offering deeper insights into values, priorities, and alignment.

ScaleCo’s enthusiastic adoption of WTF reflects its belief in the tool’s ability to guide strategic transformation. The ongoing implementation of recommendations derived from WTF insights positions the company to evolve into the innovative, future-ready organization it aspires to become. Over time, tracking these interventions will reveal whether the changes have successfully bridged the gaps identified, creating a stronger foundation for growth and competitiveness in the marketplace.

Conclusion

The ScaleCo case study underscores the transformative power of WTF in driving organizational growth and ensuring future readiness. For ScaleCo, WTF provided not just a snapshot of its current state but a clear, data-driven trajectory for its future, highlighting critical gaps and actionable opportunities. By leveraging WTF, ScaleCo was able to reimagine its business model, identify misalignments in team capabilities, and align its strategic initiatives with the realities of its rapidly changing industry.

WTF’s ability to collect, analyze, and segment perception data from multiple levels within an organization proved invaluable. It empowered ScaleCo to uncover dissonances that might otherwise have gone unnoticed, fostering a culture of transparency and evidence-based decision-making. The tool’s application to both individual and cohort-level analyses demonstrated its versatility, providing actionable insights not only for ScaleCo but also for its peer organizations in the learning cohort.

For ScaleCo, WTF can be more than a diagnostic tool; it was a strategic partner in their journey to becoming a more innovative, tech-driven, and future-fit organization. The company’s commitment to rolling out WTF across the entire workforce reflects its recognition of the value in aligning perspectives and fostering a unified vision for growth.

Key Takeaways from the ScaleCo Case Study:

Holistic Diagnostic Tool: WTF provided a comprehensive assessment of ScaleCo’s leadership, organizational, and industry metrics, offering a clear roadmap for future growth and alignment.
Empowering Data-Driven Decision-Making: WTF’s insights enabled ScaleCo to identify and prioritize strategic initiatives, from enhancing governance structures to fostering a culture of experimentation and innovation.
Cohort-Level Learning: Through benchmarking against peers in its learning cohort, ScaleCo gained valuable perspectives on its strengths and opportunities, fostering collaborative learning and best practice sharing.
Gender and Demographic Insights: WTF’s segmentation capabilities revealed critical gaps in gender and racial perceptions, providing actionable insights to enhance inclusivity and build a stronger organizational culture.
Future-Focused Transformation: By using WTF as a pre-indicator of potential outcomes, ScaleCo proactively adapted its business model, improving its readiness to navigate industry disruptions and seize new opportunities.

WTF stands out as a powerful tool for organizations like ScaleCo that are navigating complex transitions and competitive markets. It provides clarity in uncertainty, aligning internal perceptions with external demands to drive meaningful, sustainable growth. ScaleCo’s journey exemplifies how WTF can enable businesses to move beyond survival, fostering innovation, agility, and future readiness in an ever-changing world.