Analytic Note 3: The Strategic Triangle

Mark Moore
The Strategic Triangle: Fitting a Proposed Value Proposition
to an Existing Political and Operational Context
At this stage, you have developed a more or less detailed concept of the social
or public value you seek to create from your position in your context. You have
also developed a larger or smaller idea of how current efforts to create that
value might best be altered both to reflect and empirically advance the
particular dimensions of public value you have identified. You are now a
dangerous person, a person who can articulate an important and plausible
challenge to the existing status quo. Perhaps, in the course of developing this
idea, you have also begun to build a strategic team, or acquainted yourselves
with those actors who might become and important part of the wider network
you will eventually have to call on to achieve your desired purposes.
To move forward in the concrete world of action rather than design, thought
and discussion, however, one additional step needs to be taken: you need to
diagnose the degree to which your proposed public value proposition can be
authorized, supported, successfully implemented, and evaluated and adapted
in your existing economic, social, and political context. In short, you have to
“get real” about what you (and a team you can assemble) will have to do to
breathe life and energy into this plausibly effective, value-creating idea. You
have to figure out whether and how your idea can be made actionable.
Over the years, the HKS leadership and management faculty have developed
and tested an analytic framework that can be used to diagnose particular
empirical contexts to identify in that context the actors, structures, and
processes that are currently guiding collective efforts, and how they might be
influenced by you acting from your particular position to make room for, or
perhaps if the ideas are big and strong enough, to be replaced by your
particular value proposition. This idea is embodied in what we refer to as “the
strategic triangle.” Figure 1 captures the concept in a simple diagram.
Figure 1: The Strategic Triangle for Social/Public Value Creators

At one level, this concept is embarrassingly simple—almost trivial. All it does is

remind a practical person of the key elements of any idea for collective efforts
to improve social conditions.
A conception of the social or public value you seek to create (social and
public value).
A characterization of the collective actions that, if taken, could reliably
produce the desired social results (operational means and capacity).
An account of how social and public support for the proposed collective
action could be mobilized (legitimacy and support).
In short, practical thinking requires an end, a means, and a source of support
or flow of resources. Or, more simply still, any idea worth your commitment
has to be valuable, authorized (or authorize-able), and doable. What could be
simpler than that? You, no doubt, learned that lesson early in your professional
career.
At this level of abstract logic, the idea is simple and persuasive. But significant
difficulties emerge when you try to bring this simple idea down to earth and
make it work for you in your particular, concrete circumstances. Here, we focus
on two key difficulties:
The analytic, empirical (and to some degree, psychological) challenge of
ensuring that you have investigated each part of the strategic triangle
thoroughly in developing and your proposed public value initiative (the
challenge of completeness and thoroughness).
The additional challenge of ensuring the conclusions you reached in
thinking about each point of the triangle were consistent with one
another so that the value you sought to produce was plausibly achievable
through the means proposed, and that the support for the nominated
values was sufficient to guarantee a flow of resources that could launch
and sustain the proposed effort.
Completeness: Touching All the Bases
In order to have a reasonable chance of success, the ambitious collaborator
has to make sure that he or she has thought about and has a satisfactory
answer to the important questions posed at each point of the triangle.
Social and Public Value: Do I have a relatively clear idea about the social
or public value I am trying to achieve through collaboration? What is the
actual state of the problem I am trying to solve or the opportunity I am
trying to exploit? Is it big or small, located in one part of the society or
spread all over, growing or shrinking? Can I describe the particular
individuals or classes of individuals whose condition I hope to improve?
Can I describe the particular ways in which I hope to improve their lives?
Am I primarily concerned about their material welfare—their access to
food and water, their employability, their health, their education, etc.? Or
am I concerned about their individual dignity and autonomy—their
capacity to live without being constantly buffeted by need, or bullied by
individuals and institutions that show little regard for their civil and legal
rights? Or am I interested in producing results that improve not only
individual lives, but also create social and physical environments that are
 safe, healthy, prosperous, sociable, and just—at least in part by creating
moral or legal obligations on individuals that require them to contribute to
these larger public purposes?
Operational Means and Capacity: Do I have a relatively clear description
of the social actions that I believe could improve the particular individual
and social conditions that are the objects of my concern? Are there
solutions already in the field? If so, how well do they seem to be
performing both individually and as part of a more or less well-
coordinated portfolio of activity? Is there a different way of organizing
current efforts that would be more effective? Or is there a need for new
efforts to supplement or replace existing efforts? Have the new ideas
already been tested, and can they be quickly developed, or will they
require a long path of development and testing?
Legitimacy and Support: Do I know how much and what kind of support I
will actually need to build and sustain the collective capacity for action?
Can I point to the social actors to whom I can turn to provide the
necessary legal, financial, social, and political support? Can I rely on an
existing social belief that a condition is unacceptable and that a solution
must be found, or will I have to find a way to build that commitment by
mobilizing currently disengaged social actors? What are the social and
political forces supporting the current approach? Are there political actors
and forces that oppose or are resistant to taking the actions I have in
mind?
The logic of practical action insists that you answer these questions if you are
going to have a chance of success. Answering these questions will take a lot of
information gathering, talking, and thinking. But there is no escaping this
challenge. It is of little practical value to identify an important value to be
advanced if there is no plausible means of advancing it. It is of little practical
value to having an idea of an important value to be advanced and a possible
method for achieving that result if there is no idea about how the imagined
actions could be authorized, financed, and implemented in a particular social
context. One has to touch all three bases before crossing home plate. 
This does not mean that all these conditions have to be present at the outset.
But it does mean that you have to envision a plausible path that would
eventually produce an alignment of value, support, and capacity.
The good news is that if you have done the readings, viewed the tapes, and
prepared the written assignments, you have already made progress in learning
how to answer the first two key strategic questions: what social or public value
am I trying to produce and what particular production process or portfolio of
interventions can I rely on to produce the desired results?  But before going on
to the challenges of achieving coherence among the different elements, we
have to take up the third question above: what do social change agents or
public leaders have to do to build the required “legitimacy and support” for
their cause?
The Strategic Importance of Social and Political Engagement to
Build Legitimacy and Support
Obviously, the question of what kind of resources would be required to mount
and sustain a public value initiative is a key strategic issue. As a practical matter,
social change agents cannot produce much value by themselves. If they are
working in government positions, they will need legal authorization, a
continuing flow of tax dollars and regulatory authority to deploy in producing
publicly valued changes in individual and social conditions, and more general
public political support for their actions. If they are working in voluntary sector
organizations, they will need charitable contributions of money and labor, and
sometimes both the protection and support of the government in their efforts
to challenge the status quo. If they are working in the commercial sector, they
may well need some tolerance from their shareholders to accept lower profits,
and some willingness from their employees to work harder for existing wages
and their customers to pay more for the products and services they produce.
And if they are doing a start-up on their own, they will often have to depend
on friends, family, and individual and community philanthropies to get started.
It is a bit less obvious but also true that, as a philosophical matter, social change
agents cannot know for sure whether they are creating something of social or
public value without guidance from the community, society, or public as to the
values these collective arbiters of value wants to achieve. It is only when their
ideas about public policies or organizational strategies are put before the
community, the society, or the public, and more or less explicitly approved,
that they can know whether their ideas are socially and public valued rather
than simply individually valued by them.
It may be even less obvious, but still critically important, to understand that the
work of social change agents is greatly facilitated if they can tap into and
mobilize public spirit to leverage the results they can obtain through direct
expenditures on government services and regulatory or enforcement
operations. 
These observations highlight the importance of the social or political
engagement function of social change agents operating in the public, voluntary,
or commercial sector. The purpose of such efforts is really two-fold: closely
related to the legitimacy and support part of the strategic triangle on one
hand and to building the required operational capacity on the other. 
Political Authorizers and Overseers
The part of political engagement most closely associated with building
legitimacy and support is the work that managers do to engage those actors
who hold influential positions in what we can describe as their “authorizing
environment.” Public managers are accountable to citizens, taxpayers, their
elected representatives, and various other self-appointed representatives of
the public. They must be in continuous contact with the entities that can
mobilize the resources necessary to support their work and respond to their
ideas about how to increase the value of the organization. Figure 2 presents a
diagram that describes key actors in the “authorizing” environment of
government managers in the United States. This diagram differs to some
degree across liberal democracies, but even more dramatically between liberal
democracies and authoritarian states.
To a degree, one could liken this to the practical challenge that private
managers face in raising financial capital or maintaining their “license to
operate” in society. In approaching potential investors, private managers, too,
must argue and provide evidence that their plans for spending borrowed
capital are backed not only by the plausibility of the plans they set out but also
by their individual track record of performance. In approaching the public as a
whole (as well as government regulators!), private managers have to show that
their plans are at least legal; but also ideally that their efforts will provide
economic benefits to society as a whole and do no material or social harm. In
reaching out to potential customers, they have to find a way to market their
product to the large numbers of individuals who might benefit from purchases
of the goods and services they have in mind, and whose decisions to spend
their own money on those services would both socially legitimate and
practically enable the pursuit of their efforts.
But, as we have seen, the critical difference between commercial and
government managers lies in the fact that when the government acts, it acts
with and for the public as a whole; and it does so through the use of collectively
owned assets: the tax dollars and regulatory authority held by the state. This
implies that the important choices that provide resources to government and
direct them towards particular purposes are made by a collective not by
individuals.
That collective is formed quite imperfectly from the individual wants and
values of citizens through some kind of political process. When the individuals
included in that collective decide what to do, they do not decide simply as
individuals what social conditions they would like to see, and then go their own
way. Instead, they decide all at once, and altogether that, as a collective body,
they are willing to tax and regulate themselves to produce that purpose. It is
only when the government decides to do something that an unum emerges
from a roiling pluribus. 
At that moment, the body politic, acting through established decision-making
processes, acts simultaneously as both the financier supplying the resources
needed to produce public value (the investor), and as the arbiter of value in
deciding what is worth producing (the consumer). While individuals may
disagree with the decisions of the body politic, they are nonetheless obliged to
go along with it regardless of their own position—at least until they have a
chance to change the collective choice through the available methods.
Given the fact that government choices are, by definition, choices made by
and for a collective, and that all citizens are bound by these choices, public
managers face a major problem in legitimating their choices among the diverse
citizens affected by them. Indeed, given that government cannot act
effectively or justly without legitimacy, building legitimacy for government
action may be among the most important tasks facing government managers.
As the NY Times has observed: “Today’s disillusionment (with the government)
has been turbocharged by the relentless pace of the modern news media, the
unforgiving glare of social media, and the calculating efforts of partisans.”
Shaping the chaos into wise, prudent, and just collective choices that reliably
represents the interests and values of citizens, and outlining a course of action
that could plausibly lead to the realization of those values is the first and most
obvious challenge in the domain of political engagement, and to no small
degree, social engagement as well.
Citizen Authorizers and Co-producers
The second part of political engagement—the part associated more with
operational capacity—focuses less on building legitimacy and support among
those relatively few occupying the formal positions that control the faucets
regulating the flow of public money and authority, and more on mobilizing the
productive activities of the many possible partner organizations and individual
citizens who could participate in the production of the collectively desired
results.
As we will see in Module 4, when the government seeks to produce aggregate
social outcomes, it often depends not only on government employees but also
on private citizens and private corporations and associations to make more or
less voluntary contributions to those public purposes. For example, if we want
to protect society from an outbreak of swine flu, we might have to call on all
individuals to get vaccinated. If we want to have safe neighborhoods, we
might have to motivate and enable members of the community to engage in
particular forms of self-defense. If we want to increase the quality of care for
elderly individuals without bankrupting society, we may have to find ways to
engage relatives and volunteers rather than pay for expensive personnel. The
willingness of individuals and organizations to put their shoulder to the wheel
in producing valuable social results—what we have called “public spirit”—often
provides a “force multiplier” for government efforts. It helps to extend the
impact of government action beyond what the government can buy or order
from specific contracts with private individuals or private organizations. 
This part of political engagement also has its analog in the commercial sector.
To some degree, this work could be described as “public marketing,” and some
analytic frameworks and interventions can be borrowed from that field. But
again, one of the important features of public sector marketing is that the
marketers are not trying to persuade individuals to pay money for a particular
good or service; they are trying to persuade individuals to commit themselves to
activities that they would not choose for themselves, but are valuable to them and
In fact, virtually all laws ranging from those that prohibit
the wider society.
physical assaults, or thefts, or using illicit drugs, or dumping dangerous toxins
into public waterways, or sending workers into dangerous circumstances, to
preventing racial discrimination in housing and employment represent efforts
to accomplish practical results and promote right relationships among
individuals and require the state to give compelling reasons why individual
liberty should be abridged. Although those steeped in the philosophy of law
may shudder to hear, turning laws into widely accepted and understood norms
that influence individual conduct is in many ways all about marketing—
persuading individuals to go along with the collectively defined rules. That
effort includes information and explanation, but it also includes sanctions for
misconduct. And the sanctions can range from small “nudges” to quite heavy
“bludgeons.”
While one can reasonably seek to limit the reach of the “nanny state” in the
interests of preserving individual liberty and autonomy, and draw a bright,
inviolable line about particular individual rights that cannot be abridged
(without very strong and very particular reasons), a body politic may often
decide that it would be publicly valuable to achieve some collectively desired
social outcomes through the development of social norms that affect the
conduct of individual citizens, relationships among them, and relations
between individuals and the larger collective institutions of society such as
states, corporations, or other private associations. Much of the success of
such efforts depends on the legitimacy that the population as a whole
attaches to both the ends and means of such legislative efforts.
Calling a Public Into Existence
It is in this way that legitimacy and support not only affect the flow of assets
to government agencies, but also increases their potential impact on desired
social outcomes by enlisting the public spirit of citizens. And it is also the
reason that it is important to cast the concept of “political engagement” in a
wider, more philosophical context. In The Public and its Problems, the pragmatic
philosopher John Dewey argued that an important role for public officials at all
levels and in all fields of government enterprise should be committed not only
to building legitimacy and support from their formal authorizers, but also to
helping to call into existence a wider public that can not only understand, but also
act on their shared interests and values.
In this course, we focus on this empirical, operational challenge in two steps:
first by locating the key sources of legitimacy and support within a public
manager’s political environment (diagnosis); second, by listing the particular
managerial actions that can tap into those potential sources and turn latent
support into reliable and active support for a good, properly constituted cause
(action). We start with the idea of legitimacy, then turn to its sources, then
focus on the mobilization of financial resources, and ultimately the uses of
public spirit not only in defining, but also in creating public value.
Legitimacy in Public and Commercial Organizations
Legitimacy is a core concept of the theory and practice of creating social and
public value. Legitimacy can be seen as an objective quality that is rightfully
earned and attached to specific public actors and the actions they take.
But it can also be seen as a more behavioral and empirical phenomenon: the
willingness of individuals to ascribe legitimacy to some person, some particular
act or public policy, or to some organization. Whether citizens or their
representatives view public leaders, public policies, or public organizations and
the actions they take as legitimate depends partly on their substantive views
about what is good or right, and partly on their procedural views about the
processes that leaders, policies, and organizations must comply with in order
to become legitimate in the individual and collective judgments of those
affected by their actions. 
The legitimacy ascribed to a leader, a policy, or an organization is extremely
important in all government action because its presence or absence affects
the willingness of those who are called upon to contribute to the effort to do
so. The more legitimacy an effort has, the easier it will be to mobilize resources
and take actions that can change the conditions of individual and collective
life. The less legitimacy, the more resistance, and the less successful and
gratifying the public effort.
Legitimacy in the Public Sector
The central importance of legitimacy in government action derives from one
simple fact: governmental organizations rely on the coercive authority of the
state to raise the taxes and regulate the conduct of citizens that they use to
achieve collectively desired results. Because the state uses collectively owned
assets, it must justify its actions to the public as a whole—not to particular
individuals or to particular factions. Because the assets it deploys includes the
authority of the state, citizens and taxpayers have to be assured not only that
funds will be used efficiently and effectively, but also that the authority of the
state will be used justly and fairly. Because individuals are called upon to
contribute both taxes and voluntary compliance with laws and regulations
regardless of whether they benefit directly or not from the sacrifices they are
called upon to make, their consent to the actions of government is critically
important both practically and philosophically.
The consent that is granted can come with varying degrees of enthusiasm
ranging from outright hostility accompanied by active civil disobedience, to
grudging acceptance that ripples beneath a surface of compliance, through
indifference, and all the way to enthusiastic, sustained support. Moreover, the
consent will not be everywhere the same. Some will be determinedly opposed,
while others will be enthusiastically supportive. And the views about the
legitimacy of a given organization or policy may be more or less deeply rooted,
and more or less well informed by facts, and considered judgments about what
is fair, just, and in the interests of all.
Public managers, public organizations, and public policies flourish or die,
produce value or waste resources, according to their ability to sustain a view
within the body politic that the work they are doing is publicly valuable. And it
is in that claim, and its empirical standing in the minds of the body politic, that
their legitimacy lies. It is in this sense that legitimacy is as fundamental to
public-sector efforts as consumer demand is to private-sector firms. It is the
thing that practically supplies and philosophically guides public efforts towards
public value.
Legitimacy in the Commercial Sector
Public legitimacy is obviously critically important to government leaders and
managers. It is somewhat less obvious but still true that social legitimacy might
also be important for the leaders and managers of voluntary-sector
organizations that rely on the public appeal of their purposes to mobilize
voluntary contributions of money and labor. But it is much less obvious that
public legitimacy—understood as the general belief that a particular
organization is operating in the public interest—would be important to
commercial enterprises. Their common creed is that their primary responsibility
is not to a “public” but to their owners—those who have invested in the
enterprises hoping primarily for a financial return.
Still, as many business scholars have observed, modern commercial
enterprises have to be concerned about their “social license to operate,” i.e.,
their standing in the societies in which they seek to raise capital, find workers,
and sell products and services. The evidence for this claim lies in the surprising
impact that the movement for corporate social responsibility has had in
pushing profit-motivated companies to advance social purposes beyond what
is required by state regulation. To put their social responsibilities on a par with
their financial duties to shareholders, commercial enterprises in the public eye
have developed double, triple, and quadruple, bottom lines to recognize the
social and public value they are creating, even though there are no revenue
streams attached directly to the production of these results, and no specific
regulation directing them to produce the publicly valued results.
However important gestures or real performance in the direction of creating
uncompensated social value might be to commercial enterprises, it is
important to keep in mind that commercial enterprises gain most of their
public or social legitimacy (both philosophically and practically) by focusing
primarily on what commercial enterprises are supposed to do: provide low-
cost consumer goods and services, create jobs, and build wealth.
From this perspective, their (uncompensated) additional contributions to
public value represent an “add-on” to their fundamental purposes. That “add-
on” might be valued by those particular citizens, investors, taxpayers, workers,
and customers who are concerned about overall social conditions as well as
their own material welfare. Further, that appreciation might well translate into
increased loyalty and commitments from these individuals, thereby providing a
financial return to the company as well as what other satisfaction the
corporate boards might enjoy from serving those interests. But one has to
worry that the social add-ons might be quickly abandoned if their continued
pursuit threatened the profitability of the enterprise, or occasioned a hostile
takeover bid.
Sources of Legitimacy
Given the critical importance of legitimacy for public managers, an important
question becomes what can they do to enhance the legitimacy of their
enterprises in the eyes of the citizens in whose name they act, and whose
money and liberty they use to produce their results? One way to think about
this abstract question operationally and concretely is to imagine yourself as a
public official, standing in front of an angry mob that is shouting and throwing
rotten tomatoes at you for a decision you have just made, or an action your
organization has taken. What are the sorts of things you might say in your
defense—in an effort to restore your legitimacy?
Law as a Source of legitimacy
One thing you might say is that existing law required you and your
organization to take the action that is now the focus of public criticism: “The
law made me do it. I had no choice. If you want redress, you have to change
the law.”
Rooting the legitimacy of one’s decisions in existing laws (whether
constitutional, statutory, administrative, or common law) is strongly indicated
by the fact that legitimacy has the same root word as law. And that, in turn,
reminds us that being able to claim that an action you took was mandated by
the law is one pretty strong source of legitimacy.
If it were, in fact, true that the law left you as the public manager no discretion
in the matter, your claim that the law left you no choice might get you safely
out of the room. But such action hardly increases the legitimacy of what you
did in the eyes of those affected by the law. That still remains suspect, and you
have now called the law itself into ill repute by pointing to the law as the
reason for your much-maligned action.
You could, of course, make a different claim, also rooted in the law as a source
of legitimacy. You could say, “The law allows me to do this.” That, of course, is
a much weaker claim since it suggests that you had some discretion in making
a particular decision, or in managing the operations of your organization. The
obvious next question is, “Well, if you had the discretion, why in the world did
you decide to do something as stupid and unjust as what you did?”
Expertise as a Source of Legitimacy
That question forces you to retreat to a different source of legitimacy: your
expertise as a public official who is in command of facts about the current
situation, and knows what is important to do and how to do it. Your likely
answer tapping that source of legitimacy is, “I am an expert in these matters,
and I decided on the basis of the facts and my expertise that my actions were
not only lawful but the best possible actions in the circumstances.”
It doesn’t take much imagination to sense that a significant amount of
legitimacy and influence is lost when one has to shift to expertise as the basis
of a decision that affects many others. It may well be true that you are an
expert, and the actions you have taken have been guided by your expertise. It
may also be true that expertise, when claimed and demonstrated persuasively,
can increase the legitimacy of a given policy choice or the actions of an
organization.
But against the complaints of those affected, the claim of expertise may ring
hollow. They may think you have missed some important values at stake in the
choice you made, or that you have exposed them to levels of risk for which
they are not prepared.
Social and Political Consent as a Source of Legitimacy
A third response could seek to tap a different source of legitimacy: political
consent. You might say, “Wait a minute, don’t you remember that we talked
about this, and that you agreed to it?” That could be a very effective claim in
warding off the public attack.
But in order to be so, you would have actually consulted with affected
individuals in advance to gain their consent. If that step had been taken, the
crowd might never have materialized. If that step is not taken, the angry
crowds can claim that this is the first they have heard of it. Then, your consent
rests on the relatively shaky ground that you took a lawful action guided by
your expertise but not by the advice and consent of those affected.
Indeed, law and expertise are two critical sources of legitimacy. But I think it is
also clear that these sources of legitimacy are much stronger when joined to
the legitimacy that comes not only from following procedural requirements for
consultation, but in going beyond those legal requirements to help citizens
understand and consent to what is being done in their name with their money
and their liberty.
Moral Vision and Character as a Source of Legitimacy
Finally, as a last-ditch effort, you could simply make an appeal to one’s own
moral values and character. You might say, “Hey. Don’t shout at me. I am a
good guy. I am committed to advancing attractive moral values. I have good
character. I have integrity. I act consistently and authentically in accord with
my personal values.” This might be very important to you. And it might help a
little in legitimating a public choice that you are not, in your own view, a crook
or a creep.
But in the end, you have cannot legitimate a choice without developing and
using your expertise, without understanding and acting in accord with the law,
and perhaps most importantly, without making yourself available to the advice
and counsel of those you are obligated to serve—your fellow citizens. They
may be glad to have a morally upright person in public office, but they want
you to be the agent of their values (as best you can), not use your position to
insist on your own.
Social and Political Consent as the Most Important Source of
Legitimacy
Legitimacy can and should be built from all of these different sources: law,
expertise, political consent, and moral values. But among these sources, social
and political consent is the most important. After all, laws are simply the
expression of previous political agreements. Expertise has value only in service
to a public arbiter of value and you as a moral agent are important primarily in
helping a public find out what they would like to do. Legitimacy in public action
depends most importantly on the consent of a well-constituted and informed public,
and it is that which public managers must seek to create over and over again as
they take particular actions that use the money and authority of the state.

Tapping All Sources of Legitimacy

To a degree, these different sources of legitimacy can be seen as independent
of one another. But the fact of the matter is that all public-policy decisions or
organizational strategies can be evaluated in terms of the degree to which
they can lay claim to each of these kinds of legitimacy. One decision can have
significant political support, but be a bit shaky in terms of its lawfulness, or the
expertise on which it rests (e.g. building a wall along the Mexican border to
discourage illegal immigration). Another can have a great deal of expertise
behind it, but be inconsistent with existing law or political support (e.g. efforts
to reduce the general availability of guns in the US). A third can have strong
moral resonance with some individuals or segments of the society, but have
little political weight behind it, and expert opinion against it (e.g. rejecting legal
obligations for children to be immunized against measles). 
While it is important to recognize that these different sources of legitimacy
exist and have to be successfully combined to create the greatest possible
degree of legitimacy, one must also recognize that the different sources of
legitimacy are not of equal status, and their relative importance may depend
on the kind of political regime in which one is operating. In an authoritarian
regime in which a dominant moral idea about the good and just has been
imposed on the society by the government that is highly centralized and ruled
from the top, expertise may be particularly important since all the other
sources of legitimacy are dominated by the government. In a more democratic
regime, in which individuals are guaranteed rights to have and express their
own diverse views of the good and the just, and the government must win
widespread consent to act, political consent—and the constitutional rules that
protect individual rights to participate in the processes of democratic
governance—would be a more important source of legitimacy than expertise.
When thinking about building legitimacy and support, then, the usual challenge
is to find ways to tap into each of these potential sources of legitimacy to the
maximum degree possible, and not think or act as though any particular one of
these sources is sufficient in itself to legitimate a choice. The most legitimate
policies are those that have successfully developed each of these independent
sources of legitimacy and woven them together in a seamless whole.
Material and Financial Support for Public Value Creation
The idea of legitimacy as described above captures a great deal of what public
managers need to accomplish their goals. It gives them confidence in the
conception of public value they are pursuing and authorizes them to move
forward. To some degree, it protects them from those who are opposed to the
purposes they pursue. It provides them with a platform to use in approaching
other social actors who play important roles in authorizing or producing public
initiatives. It can give not only the moral force to nudge, but also the legal
authority to bludgeon private actors to contribute to public purposes. And so
on.
What is not explicitly included in the idea of legitimacy, however, is a flow of
money (or other material assets and labor) that can be deployed in productive
activities that can actually produce the material results that the public hopes to
see.
Of course, successful efforts to build legitimacy in the political and policy
realms of society may routinely go along with the appropriation of government
dollars, but the distinction between authorizing and funding is still a critically
important one. It is not accidental that legislatures pass two different kinds of
statutes: some that authorize government activity of some kind, and others
that appropriate tax dollars to particular purposes. The first draws on the
authority of the state to intervene in private life; the second uses the authority
of the state to transfer private income and wealth to collectively agreed-upon
public purposes.
Money flowing out to produce concrete results is easier to see and account for
than legitimacy and moral support for a cause. And it is more natural to think
about “funding” as a key asset to be used in producing desired results than the
fuzzier idea of “legitimacy.” But in many ways, finding financial support for a
public enterprise is secondary to building legitimacy for that effort. The simple
reason is that it is the public legitimacy—the public’s belief that they
individually and together will be better off—that both motivates funding and
leverages the funding with voluntary commitments.
One very important but surprising feature of governmental efforts to create
public value is that government financial support for given purposes can be
provided in many ways. The most obvious, common, and direct form of
financial support to public purposes is the appropriation of tax dollars to
particular public purposes. Generally speaking, those tax dollars go to: 
1. Provide services to eligible populations;
2. Enforce laws that require individuals to refrain from acting in ways
that harm an individual or collective interests, or to do their part
in advancing some common goals;
3. Support efforts to provide information to individuals that they can
use to improve the quality of their own lives;
4. Build a physical, social, and political environment in which we all
can live, work, and have a chance to pursue happiness. 
Those tax dollars are made available to government agencies through
legislative appropriations and in response to executive requests for money to
pursue authorized public purposes.
The use of those tax dollars is overseen generally by the authorizing
environment as a whole, but particularly consistently and intensively by
comptrollers general, legislative committees and staffs, budget bureaus at
different levels of government, audit agencies, and inspectors general. It is
these agencies that define the public purposes in relatively concrete terms,
and release tax dollars to be spent on those purposes. It is these agencies that
seek to root out fraud waste and abuse and to promote efficiency and
effectiveness. And it is these agencies that take the major responsibility for
evaluating whether the government agencies are actually achieving the results
they are charged with achieving.
It is rare, but worth noting, that sometimes the courts get involved in decisions
about how public money, as well as a public authority, should be spent. This
generally occurs when government agencies have acted in ways that violated
some constitutional rights held by individuals or groups. If, for example, a
school district has failed to meet provisions in state constitutions that call for
the provision of a free, equal, and high-quality education to all students, the
courts may take action to compel state legislatures and state executive branch
agencies to remediate the existing conditions. Or the courts may require
prisons to spend tax dollars to meet minimum standards of protection for
prisoners including food, clothing, beds, heat, medical care, and so on.
Ideally, the close oversight of the use of tax dollars by the agencies described
above would provide strong incentives to managers to act efficiently and
effectively in pursuing the desired results. That, in turn, would require them at
least to drive down fraud, waste, and abuse in government spending.
But efforts to call public organizations to account for performance are
handicapped to no small degree by the fact that there are many purposes that
government has to meet as a matter of law and politics. The government
cannot easily decide to go out of “businesses”, such as in the cases of national
defense, care for disabled individuals (including veterans), or the provision of
legal counsel to indigent defenders even if they are perceived as failing.
Indeed, if they are failing, the government is often forced to spend more rather
than less on the effort!
Coherence: Ensuring Consistency and Alignment Across the
Three Points
With the addition of a focus on building the legitimacy and support needed to
launch, sustain, and perhaps scale a proposed public value initiative, the
challenge of being complete is met. But it is equally important—and
conceptually more challenging—to meet the challenge of coherence.
Coherence requires that the solution developed for one point of the triangle is
consistent with the solution assumed at each of the other points on the
triangle. One cannot have a solution for the whole problem unless the solution
of each part of the problem is consistent with the others. We can use the Jean
Ekins case for a quick review of this claim.
Jean Ekins decided that she wanted to improve the lives and social conditions
under which teen-aged moms in Lesley County were living, and more
particularly to deal with the fact that they had been excluded from attending
the local public high school. This situation seemed to her: 
bad for the welfare of the moms (in both the short and long run),
bad for the welfare of the community (over the long run if not the
short run),
unfair and unjust to the teen moms (in the long and short run),
and
inconsistent with and ideal of right relationships and justice in the
community.
Improving the situation for this population in this community was the starting
idea of the social or public value she wanted to create.
In order to achieve this goal, she imagined that she could create an alternative
to the public schools, a concept she named a Family Learning Center. The goal
of that enterprise would be to make up for the educational opportunities the
young women were missing as a result of being excluded from the public
schools. That meant she had to find: 1) a space in which to operate the school,
2) faculty to teach, 3) a curriculum and materials to use, etc.
The good news was that there were only 22 students, so she did not, at the
outset, have to operate on a massive scale. She did, however, have to
significantly adapt the teaching and the curriculum to a group of students that
were of different ages and capacities, and that faced the challenge of raising
infants while going to school. Their circumstance also required the provision of
services not usually associated with high schools, such as transportation, child
care, and so on.
Building and reliably operating an enterprise like this was her starting idea of
the operational capacity she needed to produce the value she had in mind.
Taken together, the idea of public value and the operational capacity needed
to produce it constituted her social or public value proposition.
The next step was to use the strategic triangle to see if she could find the room,
the resources, and the capacities in her context to make this happen.
At the outset, the principal problem seemed to be with securing the necessary
legitimacy and support for her to go ahead. Strictly speaking, she did not need
the authorization of the local school board to start her school, but if she
wanted the teen moms to get credit for their schooling, she would have to
seek their approval. For this, she needed to use her social and political network
to carve out a sliver of local political support on the School Board. It helped
that she could point both to the obligation of the School District to educate all
students of a certain age and that the State had recently developed a program
to provide funds for educating teen-aged moms. And it probably helped to
enable the school to come into existence that it was physically separated from
the regular public school, even though that cause some problems in
transportation.
In this way, she built enough legitimacy and support to advance her cause along
a particular track.
Starting from scratch, it was not clear how she could build the operational
capacity. But the fact that she herself was a licensed teacher, that she enjoyed
teaching, and that her own children were now in school meant that she herself
could provide the key operational capacity of a teacher. She found room in a
search with a tolerant and generous minister, but had to agree to the
somewhat demanding terms that she set up and take down the physical
structures of the school each day so that the church could use the space for
its purposes.
In this way, she built an operational capacity that was reliable and good enough
to advance her goals, particularly when compared to the alternative.
Reflection suggests that the alignment she built among the spheres of the
triangle was a somewhat rickety structure that required a great deal of
personal effort to build. But one can see that the effort could be launched, and
continue for a while at a particular scale because the answers to the questions
asked at each point of the triangle made a coherent whole. If she had been
more ambitious in her advocacy for the school as an expression of the rights
of teen moms, she might well have lost her local support—more explosives in
the mailbox, more opposition in the School Board or the City Council. She
might also have set the standards for the school so high that she could not
achieve them given the assets she had available: her own effort, voluntary
contributions from others, and some license and money from the State
government. It was a modest beginning, but it happened against the odds at
the outset.
The important analytic point of this brief discussion is to see that every time
you change one piece of the calculation (e.g. it might be a good idea to add a
special school for teen moms to Lesley County’s educational system to create
some public value that is now lying on the table), you have to go around the
strategic triangle to see the implications for the other parts (e.g. what form of
school do I have to create that would produce valuable results for the moms
but still be acceptable to the community. That is, what kind of school could I
possibly create given the limited resources available to me and the needs that
the teen moms are likely to have beyond educational services.
This case illustrates that there are many, many ways that Jean Ekins might
have acted to improve the lot of teen moms. But each time she imagines a
solution to one piece of the strategic triangle (e.g. add child care and
transportation to make it more likely that the teen moms will come and be able
to take full advantage of the service), she has to check that against the other
pieces (who will organize and provide the resources for that new element of
the school, and who will actually organize and operate those new little
production systems). That means she has to keep going around and around
the different points of the triangle submitting each new idea to all three tests
until she finds one that seems good on all accounts. That is the idea that will
be both the most valuable, and have the best chance of succeeding.
Investigating Whether Your Idea Will Work in the Particular
Messy Empirical Reality You Confront
So far, we have been focusing on the conceptual challenges of using the
strategic triangle to test the completeness and coherence of the change you
envision. And as we have seen, the challenges of touching each base on one
hand and ensuring that value, support, and capacity are all aligned in the
action one is proposing to take, can be mentally challenging.
The Key Empirical Question: Can You Do it?

But the quality of the strategic calculations and design depend not only on
conceptual completeness and coherence, but also on the accuracy of the many
fact-based, empirical judgements one must make in carrying out this practical
calculation.Look again at the questions asked above that were designed to
ensure that you had “covered all the bases” and done so in a “coherent way.”
What you will see is that these are all, empirical factual questions about the
particular concrete circumstances in which you are operating. One cannot be
sure that an idea is authorizable or doable in a particular concrete
circumstance until you know how much social and political energy and
operational capacity exists in the relevant social context that you can use.
The first step in answering that question is to recall the particular position you
occupy. That draws you back from the world of what would be nice to
accomplish sometime and somewhere to the practical question of what I can
do in the here and now to make a difference. You are not dangling out there in
space, and you do not have god-like capacities to change everything. You
have a position, and there are some things that are immediately within your
reach (or could soon come within reach), and there are other things that, right
now at least, are a bit beyond your reach.
The second step is to look broadly and deeply into the particular context in
which you are operating to determine how much of what you need is currently
within reach. A good starting point in this analytic effort is with a close review
of the status quo: the state of the problem, the actions now being taken to deal
with it, and the political forces that are supporting and directing the existing
efforts in your particular context. Making yourself an expert on the status quo is
critically important for two different reasons.
First, a close look at the status quo will help you to see exactly where your
value proposition fits into the current efforts being made to deal with the
problem. You can see whether your idea adds something new to the effort, or
simply adds an additional effort along lines already being pursued. You can see
whether your idea complements existing efforts by filling a key gap in the
overall effort, or whether it competes with them by proposing a new and
better version of something that already exists.
Second, and perhaps most important, a review of the status quo can provide
important information about the alignment of existing social and political
forces that have shaped the current effort. The status quo is never there by
accident. It represents a historically powerful answer to the question you are
now asking as you think about making changes. The power comes partly from
sheer inertia (we’re doing what we have always done, and it was good enough
before, why not now?). But it may also come from a very close alignment with
dominant collective ideas about whether an observed social condition is a
problem or not, and if a problem, how it might best be ameliorated. Against a
determined indifference or a narrow orthodoxy, your particular value
proposition may not make much headway.
Coping with and Exploiting a Heterogeneous and Dynamic Environment

But what the review of the status quo might not reveal (without a wider and
more penetrating analysis) is the existence of fissures undermining what
seems to be a hegemonic structure; or (to change the metaphor) the
underutilized pools of assets that could be tapped to create room for your
approach to the problem. There are always forces at work just under the
surface of the status quo that threatens to upset it, or at least force some
important adaptations. There are always some untapped assets that could be
mobilized or diverted to the new cause. In fact, the emergence of you as a
collaborative problem solver with a commitment and an idea may be evidence
of the change that is already happening, as well as the catalyst for more!
Indeed, when one works day to day in social and public realms, one might well
be more impressed by how dynamic the environment is than how constant. If
one looks broadly enough, and through a lens that can reveal the relevant
environment in some detail, one can see not only fissures and pools, but
widening cracks, and flowing streams.
By looking closely at the individual and social conditions one seeks to improve
(what we call the task environment), one can see that the problem to be
solved often consists of a set of smaller conditions that need to be addressed
separately, and that the character and composition of the problem are
changing more or less rapidly over time with some parts of the problem
getting larger, and new problems emerging.
Similarly, when one turns one’s attention to the potential sources of legitimacy
and support for one’s value proposition (what we call the social and political
authorizing environment), one will see many players, with many different ideas
about the values they would like to see advanced by and reflected in any social
or public efforts to deal with a social or publicly defined problem. Moreover,
one will see changes in which actors become engaged and active in pressing
their views.
Finally, when one looks at the evolution of the efforts made to deal with a
given problem, one can see that some old ideas seem to lose their hold on
resources and fade away, and new ideas show up to claim the field. Ideally, this
movement would reflect real learning about what individual or combination of
methods works to deal with a particular problem, but the changes are not
always this rational. The world of social problem solving is sometimes as
subject to fads as commercial markets. 
To many the fact that the task environment, the authorizing environment, and
the operational environment are all both complex (in the sense that each has
many parts), and dynamic (in the sense that the parts keep changing in terms
of their relative importance), is upsetting. They would like a more settled
environment and a more rational way of proceeding as a social whole.
But the other way to see these volatile conditions is that they create the need
and the opportunity for social and public leaders to strut their stuff. Compared
with a hegemonic status quo, the volatility suggests the opportunity for
creativity, resourcefulness, and change. Compared with the slow process of
bureaucratic adaptation, the volatile conditions might allow more rapid
adaptations and the discovery of better solutions. But in order for this to be
true, those who wish to be social and public leaders must learn to see the
world through the frame of the strategic triangle. Or that, at least, is our claim.
Conclusion:
While the concept of the strategic triangle has a very simple, intuitive logic, its
effective use by strategic agents determined to create public value demands a
great deal of analytic, conceptual, and fact-finding work. Successful change
agents have to pay attention to each point of the triangle. They have to carry
out a wide-ranging search for facts and empirical evidence that would allow
them to have confidence both that their idea would work if implemented, and
that that there is room in their particular context for their proposed initiative
to be broadly supported and reliably executed at the required scale and scope.
Inevitably, the path forward will not be entirely foreseen. Indeed, it is a
common military adage that no planned strategy survives its first contact with
the enemy. Similarly, no imagined public value proposition remains
unchallenged and unchanged by its first contact with an existing status quo in
a particular context.
But what can survive is a continuing capacity to push forward, learn, and make
adaptations in what was initially proposed. As they make those changes, it is
important to keep in mind the degree to which some envisioned value is being
sacrificed to reality and to keep looking for the political interventions and
operational innovations that can protect or even go beyond the original levels
of public value creation that were imagined. Having gone through the
systematic, detailed effort to develop an initial strategy for creating public
value, it will be much easier to be able to spot new opportunities in a complex
and dynamic social context, and to adapt the original plan to these new, or
newly understood, conditions.