Episode 2: Dimensions of Value

George: Hi, Mark.

Mark: Hey, George, how are you doing?

George: Good. It’s good to be here. Nice to see you again and to be back together today as we continue our conversations on Public Value. For those of you who may be listening, I’m here today with my friend, Professor Mark Moore, who’s the originator of the concept of public value and has spent many years of his multi-dimensional academic career researching and supporting the practice of creating public value.

Today, we’re here to basically have a conversation in a series of podcasts to bring to life these ideas behind Public Value. In the first episode, just quickly to recount what we did, Mark did a deep dive of the concept of Public Value. To be honest, it was really all Mark, but then also a special thanks to our colleague, Abigail Eckstrom, who did a great post-production job of visually scribing to bring the core concepts to life. We really appreciated that. She’s here today, again, to help us with that.

Just to recap the first episode, in it, we discussed how Public Value can be considered along two broad categories. One is looking at the dimensions of Public Value in terms of the benefits that we might receive, that could be material welfare or the wellness of people, or in terms of justice and equity and assuring right relationships between people.

That’s one dimension, or one axis if you were to consider it. We also discussed how there’s two types of what we might call valued effects or positive effects that could be engineered to occur, one at the individual level, and a second at a collective level. You can take certain actions in the public and they can be focused on an individual that could produce welfare or equity, but also they could be focused on a broader collective.

Now, sometimes those individual effects will aggregate and oftentimes you want them to aggregate to a collective impact, but you might also focus on the collective level in terms of the actions that you’re taking to produce value. With that, Mark created this two-by-two matrix. We’ve called it sometimes the public value two-by-two but in general, we can use that if we get nimble enough with it, to assess and even design value-creating efforts.

If you didn’t watch that first episode and you’re interested in a great overview of public value, please do watch it. Now to move on, in terms of today, I’d like for us to take that as a starting point, what we talked about last week, and what I just quickly described. To begin, discuss three things. One, why is it important to think about Public Value when we’re taking action in the public?

I’d like Mark to opine on that and think about it. Secondly, what it might look like for us to articulate Public Value. There’s a lot of various dimensions, as Mark mentioned, but honestly, he was painting a broad picture of what Public Value can be. It can be much more intricate. I’m going to push on Mark a little bit to talk about what that looks like for a specific program or an activity or even a policy.

Then lastly, I want to push a little bit on that process. What is that process for us to agree on with a set of people what we’re trying to do in terms of producing Public Value? With that, we’re going to jump right in. Mark, I hope I did an okay job in terms of talking a little bit about what we talked about last time. I want to go in and just talk about this idea of thinking about Public Value.

You gave us a great picture of it from last week, but why is it important? Why is it important for the public manager or the practitioner that I might come at things from a practitioner perspective? Why is it important to think about Public Value?

Mark: I think, to me, it seems incredibly obvious why it’s important to think about Public Value but let me just enumerate some of the reasons. The first is that if you’re a purpose-oriented individual and you’re trying to make something happen in the world that is ideally an improvement or better than what we’re currently doing, you have to be able to describe what it is about the world that would be better if you were successful in completing your project or not.

There’s a preliminary first step for all goal-oriented public leaders, which is to say, in what particular ways am I trying to improve conditions that individuals are living and working? Hoping within inside what are the conditions of the world in which people are living and working that I could try to improve? Number one then is that it gives you a purpose and a motivation. That’s point number one. Second point is that, ideally, you’re not the only one who’s motivated by those purposes and values. Indeed, if you are the only one that’s motivated by those purpose and values, you’re in trouble because you won’t find, within the context in which you’re working, other people to help you accomplish the goals that you have in mind.

The values that you are motivating you have to be broadcast or displayed in a flag that gets waved in front of a large number of other people and moves them to want to join the effort and help produce the results that you see. The very important motivational aspects associated with defining the purposes that we’re after.

The third thing though is that, at some stage, those purposes become disciplines in the sense that they say, if you wish to achieve this result in the world, then the following things have to change. In order for those things to change, these other things have to change. People with resources and knowledge and commitment to make the change have to do something different than what they’re now doing.

The purposes then become the discipline of the design of the interventions, which, if made, would produce the desired results. Finally, and I think this is the one that’s often neglected is that they may change. This is the important thing. We often act as though the fixed thing in this calculation about how to create Public Value is the purposes. Experience is going to teach us something about not only what works empirically but it’s also going to teach us some things about what we ought to value.

We’re going to come across people who suddenly resist what it is that we’re doing. Our first instinct might be to say, “Oh, you’re wrong-headed. You should have the same purposes that we do.” If we open ourselves up to their concerns, which is a necessary condition to engage them in our process, then chances are we might learn something about the values that we’re pursuing and how they might be expanded or reframed and given more clarity and empirical clarity in depth.

We’re going to learn about values and purposes as we go along. For many people, that’s upsetting because they feel like the original justification for what they were doing is being undermined. If you’re doing this right, you ought to experience it is an improvement in terms of your ability to see what others might see as being at stake in the situation.

You can start with a particular set of purposes and hold firm to those but it’s much better to think of them contingently and to imagine that, as we begin doing the work and as we began talking to the people who can help us do the work, we’re going to discover more and more about what values are that are at stake for the people that are being affected, and understand what their motivations might be to be able to help us do the work.

Then that changes the discipline that’s associated with the objectives that we’ve identified now not just for ourselves, but for the group as a whole.

George: It’s interesting. Personally, I can understand setting goals so that as you take action you can start to see if you’re actually having that impact that you hope to have in terms of those valued effects. I also understand that, if I am having those impacts, we could turn that into a discipline of some type. Then obviously you’re talking a lot about learning.

How are we learning as we start to do this? We allow it to be out in the public. People are providing their own perspective on what effects may be happening or on other approaches. There’s a lot of different learning opportunities as we do that now. This idea of broadcasting and waving the flag is very interesting. We’re not going to spend a lot of time on that today, but can you just talk a minute about why is that so important in terms of waving that flag? Why is it important for me to write this down, put it on the wall so that other people can see it?  There’s a lot to that idea.

Mark: The crucial thing in creating public value is, in many respects, to call into existence a public that wants to accomplish a particular thing for themselves and for others in the public domain. For that purpose, it’s necessary to say what it is that you’re trying to accomplish. The difficulty, of course, is that the overwhelming tendency is to make two errors in this process.

Error number one is to pander to a particular constituency and a particular set of interests and values that they have, but if you’re in the public realm and particularly if you’re holding a public office, your job is often to try to find a way to accommodate and advance the interest and values of many different factions or groups within the larger whole.

You have to resist the temptation to hand or to one constituency and to hold yourself open to the question of what you could do to advance the interests and values of other constituencies as well. That’s one reason to sort one area that you wish you should try to avoid. The other area you should try to avoid is having the objective be either much too broad and abstract so that nobody can quite use it effectively as it discipline.

You could also make the mistake of having it be too narrow so that it leaves out opportunities for others to participate as you go along. The challenge is to keep imagining an unfolding conception of a variety of purposes, some of them formulated at high levels of abstraction and in the future, others being formulated at much lower levels of abstraction, concreteness, and more present and urgent now to get done with each of the lower level things being part of the contribution to the larger goal but each of the smaller things also being a piece that a particular person in your context could bite off as theirs and use as their particular contribution to the larger enterprise.

George: Interesting. I know from that tension that you’re talking about, the tension of the concrete and specific, that could be in the short term or it could be a smaller piece of a larger effort that’s going on concurrently, but you have to be concrete, but at the same time, you don’t want to lose that higher level of abstraction, which could be a broader set of public value.

I’ll just say that’s one of the biggest things that, when you look at a cross-boundary collaboration that people struggle with because you’re trying to hold this group of people together that are coming at this from very different angles but you want to hold them together and so that’s one of the challenges that we have.

Mark: If you’re really good at this, you’d create a framework that connects up the work of each of the individual members to a cumulative effect, which is the thing that motivates all of them to try to accomplish the desired goal.

You get simultaneously a focus on the individual concrete pieces of work that need to be done, and, on the other hand, an inspiring vision of what might be possible.

George: That’s not easy though, Mark.

Mark: No, of course not. It takes a huge amount of conversation and a huge amount of continuously adjusting, going up and down levels of abstraction, going from the present into the future, and in order to keep that moving in the right direction and the collective direction, you have to spend a lot of time talking with one another about what each is doing and why that person thinks that particular thing is important.

Then checking the degree to which that particular thing that is now the focus of effort and work is actually contributing to the larger more future-oriented purpose.

George: It’s ongoing and continues. The role of the person who’s trying to attend to and care for the collaboration or the group of people working together has to constantly be working on doing what you’re talking about. That’s great. That’s really helpful.

Mark: Actually, the hardest thing about that sometimes is giving up your own initial conception of both what the end was and what the means were, and learning from the people around you about what their ends and their contributions could be, and seeing, in that, a potential to do a great deal more than you could do by yourself.

George: That’s so true, and that’s where some of the folks that end up being team leaders that are caring for the collaborative group have to suspend some of their judgment, because they typically come from a certain perspective themselves. I think that’s really helpful. If we go on, if we could bring it down–

Mark: Just for the point, George, there’s a framework, there’s an idea there that has to do with that the large framework can be a discipline for the adequacy of each of the particular means and the relevance of the particular means. The small bits can be a discipline on the large concept as well because if we can’t figure out what the small bits are that contribute to the larger thing, then we can’t make progress with respect to the larger thing.

If you watch people, as I know you have done, struggling with the question about how to figure out how to make progress on a large and complicated purpose with an associated project, you’ll notice in the conversation that people will go up and down in terms of levels of abstraction, and in terms of the whole versus the parts, and the short run versus the long run.

What will happen typically in a group conversation is somebody will come in and say, “Let’s blue sky this,” or “Let’s take on the big picture and see what’s really important to get done here,” and that will raise the level of conversation and use the general idea to challenge and raise questions about what we’re currently doing, and that will lead to learning and creativity.

People will do that for a while, and then somebody from the back of the room will say, “Yes, well we’ve been talking about this blue sky stuff for a long time. Let’s get back down to concrete bits,” and that will drive the level of conversation down into the concrete bits to where people can begin visualizing what they’re going to do tomorrow that would contribute to the larger whole.

That dialectic, it seems to me, is critically important for progress to be made. Both have to happen. It’s not as though you do one and then the other, it’s that you do both of those over time in a group, learning how to think and talk together, and also learning the basis on which the people are learning and talking, which is usually some set of ideas or some set of experiences that are important for the group to know about.

There’s a kind of skill that’s associated with this process that has to do with feeling comfortable with moving up and down levels of abstraction, from the present to the future, and from pieces to the whole.

George: It’s such a key dynamic, and it’s a key dynamic to pay attention to. Honestly, as you say, to foster, if you’re someone who’s trying to keep that collaborative or that group of people working together and staying together in order to push things forward. I love that. Mark, if I were trying to make this more concrete, I know you have examples, and in your book, you have some great examples like the New York Police Department example, but how do you actually bring this down to a concrete set of what you call dimensions of value?

Can you talk a little bit more about that? If we were to take an example, could you say what are some of the dimensions of value and why do I care? Can you go through a little more detail?

Mark: Yes, sure. I think that this is another kind of strategic skill that’s important to develop, is to be able to examine the current context and listen to the conversation that’s going on in that context about what the ends and means are of the particular issue that you’re trying to address. I have a couple of suggestions for how to do that. One of them is to review newspaper articles discussing the issue, or in the more modern age, not only reviewing newspaper articles, but mass media and the social media about how an issue is being discussed. I think, mostly, what’s going on in public conversations about issues is denomination of an important value to be advanced that is not being advanced. I sometimes say that the basic structure of any newspaper article is important dimension of public value being sacrificed.

If you’re a reporter and you can say, “Oh, my God, there’s a value that we all care about and it is not being honored in what’s being done,” that’s what gives you a story. If you read the story-

George: Mark, just a minute, for one second. The reason you say that is because a journalist is looking at it from the public’s perspective trying to accentuate or bring out the fact that a certain public value is being crossed or being pushed back or being held back or constrained.

Mark: Or ignored or damaged. That’s exactly right. You want to use their perceptions of what the public might be interested in as a guide to use their judgment about that and write it down. When we did the work on trying to identify the public values that should be advanced through policing, we went through a lot of newspaper articles to find out what people were saying about what was good or what was bad about the police department.

Every article we read, we tried to write down the one or two important dimensions of value that were implicit in the indignation that was being shown in that particular story. One way to do it is to just listen to the public conversation. What’s usually going on in the public conversation is one group is complaining about one value, and another group is complaining about another, and they’re talking past one another because they’re acting as though the value that was of concern to the other faction shouldn’t be a concern to the first faction.

That can’t be true in a public or a democratic system because everybody has a right to say what they think is valuable and to defend their conception of that. Another place to go then is not simply to the newspaper articles, but essentially to different groups who are in some important way touched by or being affected by the either existing government or existing public actions or the proposed changes in public actions that would produce a change in the public conditions.

For example, it’s not hard to figure out who might be the important people, but once you stand in the shoes of those people that are being affected you can see immediately that they might have different values. One of the examples I use often, as you suggest, George, is the example of a police department.

In trying to get out the question of what important dimensions of value ought to define performance or define the public value that a police department is trying to produce, I ask the students to take up particular roles. I ask one student, I say, “Well, you’re a victim of crime. Somebody just came in and took a lot of your money and scared your family. Now, what is it that you want from the police department?”

People can put themselves in that position without too much struggle and say, “Well, I guess I’d like a police department that solved the crime and got me my property back, and I’d like to see the justice system call the offender to account in some way that seemed to honor the fact that that person injured me and it done something wrong. I’d like all that to happen as quickly and reliably as possible.”

I say, “Okay, that’s the perspective of the victim of crime. Now let’s talk about the criminal. What kind of a police department would a criminal like?” The answer to that’s not very hard to give either. It’s, “Well, would you like the police department to be large or small?” “Well, I’d like it to be small.” “Competent or incompetent?” “I’d like it to be incompetent.”

Then say, “How would you like to be treated if this small incompetent police department managed to catch you?” The answer is, “Oh, I’d like to have my rights respected. At least that and maybe even some recognition of my humanity is a consequence of even though I’ve committed this crime.” Say, “Okay, I got that.” Then you go to them and say, “You’re now a taxpayer. What kind of a taxpayer would you like to– or what kind of a police department would a taxpayer like to have?” You think about that and you say, “If I’m strictly speaking just a taxpayer, I think what I want is cheap, ideally, and the smaller the police department the better.” You say, “Well, we’ve got it now then. Now let’s see. Let’s add up these different individuals and see what dimensions of value are there and whether they can agree on them or not.”

The answer, I think, looking at it is you say, “Oh, well, look, each has nominated a particular dimension of value from their particular position as important.” We could disqualify some of them or increase the standing of some of those people relatively the others, in terms of how important it would be that we acknowledge the values they held in the design of a police department.

It’s clear that if they’re just thinking in those terms, they’re not going to be able to agree on what constitutes a good police department. That seems and is known to be a fundamental problem in governments and democratic governance, in particular. The philosopher John Rawls had a very interesting solution to that problem. He said, “Let’s suppose there’s one person in a position that I didn’t mention, which is a citizen as opposed to a criminal offender, a victim of crime, or a taxpayer.”

There’s somebody out there called a citizen and maybe that’s the person whose views we ought to take seriously. Say, “What do you mean by a citizen?” What Rawls would’ve said was a citizen would be a person who is thinking about what a good police department would be without knowing what particular position he would occupy in the society.

That person wouldn’t know whether he was going to be an offender or a victim or a taxpayer. He’s just living in a society where he could end up in any of those rules. Then the question is, knowing that, how would that citizen decide what it is that he or she would like as a police department? I think that you can see that if you could take that exercise seriously, you might decide on a police department that could provide a reasonable amount of value in each of the dimensions that were previously nominated as important to each of the other individual positions that we’ve identified.

If you think about that a little bit, you realize that what we’re trying to get at here is a set of dimensions that would be nominated by individuals that are affected by a problem and then get included or not included and waited or unweighted, by some neutral principle that says, “You don’t know, as an individual, which of these positions you’re going to end up in, so please decide on a particular set of values that you would choose as an individual not knowing what particular position you were going to occupy, or more particularly learning to think like a citizen.”

When you think about that, it turns out to be important because all of us would like to spend less money on a police department, but we’d like to have enough to make effective in controlling crime. All of us would like to have a police department that would be effective in controlling crime, but each of us would be indignant if, in the process of trying to control crime, our individual rights were offended, where we were disproportionately punished by society for minor crimes that we committed or unfairly selected for that matter.

The idea is you have multiple dimensions, and then those dimensions get evaluated by individuals and by a collective, ideally the individuals thinking and acting like citizens, and the collective acting collectively to identify and try to find the best way to advance all of those dimensions of value as best we can simultaneously.

George: Mark, there was a lot there. I want to grab a couple points and just highlight them and then I want to ask you another question.

Mark: Sure.

George: One thing I really appreciated was the fact that you said you may start with the media in order to understand the important dimensions of value, because the media is typically a public voice for affected parties that may not have their own voice or the platform for their own voice. Then I love the fact that you backpedaled and you said, ultimately, that points out the groups, the affected parties that you need to go to talk to.

Whether that is someone who was a victim of crime, whether that was the criminal, whether that was another affected party directly or indirectly, that the media helps you to understand those groups. They ultimately will be able to help you understand, if you want to go get more granular, you go directly to those key strategically important people that you want to really understand and represent in this work. Now, the second thing that you said that’s really important is this idea of a citizen, because you’re assuming that a citizen can weigh these different things and that they are willing to do that. I’ll just say, for my own experience, I live in a bubble. In a lot of times, I’m in a bubble, and so I think of things in a certain way. I think one of the things that you’ve taught me through our interactions over the years has been, no, go place yourself with each of those affected parties. Now come back and pretend to be a citizen, but don’t assume you can be a citizen until you’ve actually taken up those roles.

I just want to point that out because it’s been extremely valuable for me to understand that, because now, once you’ve heard those things, you can try to be a citizen. You still may not do a perfect job, but you can start to say, “Well, wait a minute, it wasn’t just how I was affected. There’s all sorts of other people that I really need to hear their voice and understand that to come up with this set of dimensions of value that we would pay attention to as a citizen and as a citizen of a larger society.”

Once you have this picture, I guess my question is, okay, great, there’s a lot of dimensions of value you just talked about, what am I doing with that? I’ve just painted this picture. I’ve really come up with an analysis based on talking to key people and directly-impacted folks. I have this picture. What is it that you’re doing with those sets of all those dimensions of value?

Mark: Yes. I think you’re trying to actually sensitize yourself to what’s at stake for the society as a whole at both the individual and the collective level, because in the end, all judgements about what should be done are based on predictions of effects of those actions on those particular dimensions of value. You can’t get to a very competent technical discussion of what’s a good public policy without first having identified what all the particular dimensions of value that are at stake in making a choice about whether to depart from the status quo in a particular way to produce a particular set of results.

There’s a technical concept here that is somewhat useful because the economists and mathematicians speak about something that they call an objective function. What an objective function is, precisely the list of nominated dimensions of value that define all the relevant values that are at stake in a choice that you’re going to make, so that you can make a responsible choice anticipating what the effects are.

The science part of that is making accurate predictions of the effects. The philosophical part of that is being able to properly weight the importance of those different dimensions of value, and make a choice that maximizes the overall value of all the effects across all dimensions.

In fact, we never get there. You could imagine that– It might be that the technical requirements of optimization in public policy can’t ever be met. There’s a technical matter as well as a philosophical matter. What you then have to do, when you think about it, even a consumer making a choice about whether to buy a product or not, doesn’t really know how he or she is precisely weighing the attributes or values of a particular product or service.

It’s not as though they write. Consumer reports tries to write down the 100 different attributes of any particular product so that you can make a rational choice, but you would reckon most people don’t actually go through and rank things on that basis. They go and look at something and then in some kind of normative leap, they say, “I want to buy this.”

That person doesn’t really know what they value until they make that decision. You can imagine that the same would be true of a collective, that it doesn’t really know what it values until it decides. Then what becomes important is the construction of a method of interrogation of our condition, if you will, that sets up for us a better picture than we started with about what’s at stake, and helps us understand the magnitude of the consequences of some of those values, and then says, “Okay, make your choice.” There’s one other thing that I want to mention about this, which is that everybody, and particularly my economist friends, love to say that there’s no such thing as a free lunch. What they imagine is that there are always going to be tradeoffs among these things in the sense that if I’m a citizen and I want more security and I’m willing to pay for it both in the tax dollars and threats of unfairness to my fellow citizens, then I’m going to choose a different police department than if I were interested in justice first and not so interested in cost and would only take the kind of security that I could get if I were acting justly and fairly with a just set of laws.

What we end up with then is this interesting question about, how do we make those collective decisions, and to what extent can we join the messy processes of politics to the logic of optimization, if you will, to reach a satisfying choice about what could be produced? Now, as I say, the economist always like to say that we’ll face a tradeoff there.

What’s interesting is that they forget that, in their conception, tradeoffs are only necessary if the system is currently performing at what they call the production possibility frontier. That is if we’ve examined all the possibilities, and we now see that we do face a tradeoff because out there on the production possibility frontier, we have to make a tradeoff.

We have to choose more crime or more security or more justice or something like that. The fact of the matter is that we’re probably never at the production possibility frontier. There’s always this interesting question of whether and to what degree we can find the means for producing more of what it is that we like. It seems to me that we ought to, as a matter of just ordinary practice, assume that there are improvements that we can make on all dimensions until we do something and discover that we had to pay a price.

Now, the fact of the matter is we never gather enough information to know exactly where that production possibility frontier is. The reason to focus on the multidimensionality of this idea of public value is to put pressure on us to begin accumulating experience along all the different dimensions of value that we’re producing through different methods so that we can become smarter both with respect to the values and with respect to the methods of achieving it.

Anytime somebody tells you, “We’re going to face this tradeoff,” you say, “Okay, maybe, but let’s try it if we think there’s an opportunity to improve on one dimension, and we can’t see that there’s a real huge result in terms of loss with respect to the other, let’s give it a try.” We don’t do anywhere near enough experimentation or evidence gathering to show us what’s possible against all dimensions of value that are out there that are important to us.

George: That’s great. I know the first time you introduce me to that frontier we talked a lot about it. I recognize now after working with a lot of teams that are trying to enact change that oftentimes you could do more if you just recognize those different pieces of value. If you recognize them, you could actually do more without changing what is the disvalued effects or the costs, but oftentimes we always think that the costs, oh, no, that’ll cost too much, and to your point, that’s usually not true.

There’s usually additional value based on certain affected parties that you could bring to the table based on the same cost. Those costs could be different things, as you say, money, it could be permissions, it could be the use of public spirit to get behind something, but usually you can do more. I really appreciate that thinking. With all of this that you’ve said, we now have a backdrop of all these dimensions of public value at a much more granular level than what you painted in the two by two.

We can see how the two-by-two acts as a way of pushing us to at least think about additional broader categories that we may be paying attention to. As you said, it’s not only benefits or valued effects, it could also be disvalued or costs that we need to articulate because both of those happen within this work. To your point, it’s quite possible that we could do more without actually incurring additional cost, which is always a good one. Now anything else that we should be thinking about, because this may be a good time for us to stop, but I also know this takes me in all sorts of different avenues of where we could actually have additional conversation. Anything else that you think we should touch on that would wrap this up or be additional to what we’ve talked about?

Mark: I think this is good. I think that the one thing that we might have in the back of our mind, as we go to get ready for the next session, is that when we look at the concrete situation of trying to mobilize legitimacy and support for a particular set of actions that will have a particular set of predicted consequences on these different dimensions of value we’ll find actors that are explicitly focused on one or two of the dimensions but not the others.

Some of those will be in powerful positions in the authorizing environment, and others will be in weak positions. There’s this interesting question about, as we go from understanding the values that are actually at stake in the choices that we make, we can also begin paying attention to the who it is in the political environment and the context, in general, that is representing a constituency for that value. We can begin to improve the political dialogue by looking around to find out whether all the relevant interests and values are being well represented or not.

George: Got you. Mark, I don’t want to jump into legitimacy and support, and I think that’s a great lead-in for next time. Can I ask you one more question? Last time we talked, you spoke about the public value account. You’ve now shared enough information to construct a public value account. Could you just say a tiny brief bit about the public value account, because we now have the dimensions of value and we have some of the perceived costs. We could actually construct to that.

Mark: Ideally, what we would learn to do, over time, and we’ve been making gradual progress on this is for any particular governmental organization or perhaps for any particular public initiative that is taken which have defined purposes and defined resources and defined production processes that we’re using to produce the desired results, is that we could construct something that would allow the public as a whole to see what values are being advanced into what degree.

This is a conceptual document, as you suggest, because it has to identify the good things that we are hoping are going to happen to some degree. We also have to identify the bad things that might happen to some degree. It’s a conceptual document but it’s also an empirical document because we actually have to attach to each of the conceptual ideas a measurement method.

This construction of a public value account begins with our ability to name the important dimensions of value that might be at stake. That’s what we’ve been talking about mostly. Then there’s a empirical piece that requires us to simply observe roughly but concretely, whether that affect seems to be occurring. Then there’s another empirical step, which is whether we can count or measure the degree to which the effects that we’re imagining are occurring so that we get a quantitative idea about how big the effect is relative to other effects.

Then there’s a last step, which is to either monetize or find others some common currency within which we could compare the value of effect A versus effect B. A lot of people get hung up too early on the question of that last thing, which is, can we monetize it or can we have it all on the same, develop a unit that we could use that would allow us to weigh effect 1 versus effect 2 versus effect 3.

I think that’s much less important at our current state of knowledge about public policymaking than the first three steps which are to name to observe and to begin counting in terms in units that are relevant to that particular effect, whether things are getting better or worse and by a lot or only by a little. The problem of making the dimension, the measurements commensurable across dimensions, which is the monetization issue is less important and is more likely to lead to errors in making judgements, in my view, than if we simply look at four or five different dimensions about which we’ve named carefully, which we’ve observed carefully, and which we’ve learned how to count.

We know the size of an effect relative to where we now are for each of the dimensions of value. Where we can leave unanswered for a while, the question about how we ought to value gains or losses in one of those dimensions relative to others. Simply present that as a choice. Earlier, when I was talking about consumers making choices, I don’t think they know exactly.

They don’t write down an objective function that says how value A should be weighted against value B. They look at the thing and they say “Hmm, it’s got a little bit of A, it’s got less of B than I might have liked but it’s okay relative to the cost. I’m going to buy it.”

It’s a very crude system of weighting but it happens experientially. It doesn’t happen analytically. If we could somehow rather improve our ability to put before the public an accurate account, the anticipated effects on the relevant dimensions and people could see in that the particular dimensions of value that they thought were important and discover that there were additional dimensions of value that they now think are important but hadn’t thought about it until they saw this public value account.

Then asked them to make a choice about that, that would be preferred to the way we currently do things which is to keep beating up one another about the relative importance of value A versus value B when we don’t even know the degree to which those things are going to be much affected by what it is proposing to do.

George: Yes, excellent. That backdrop of the dimensions of value put into a public value account becomes this learning tool because it becomes a backdrop to which we start to see if our actions are producing the value and it becomes that continuous learning and hopefully continuous improvement that we hope for.

Mark: In the end, all of this is about in supportive learning and learning not only as individuals but collectively. All of the learning as individuals in a collective context is to provide help in helping each of us and all of us together become better citizens.

George: Yes, and to have a better world. Thank you.

Mark: You’re welcome.

George: Excellent, Mark. Appreciate you today in terms of spending this time and going and doing a deep dive again. Abigail, we appreciate you too. I think we’re done.

Mark: Great. I’ll look forward to talking to you again.