Episode 3: Goal Hierarchies

George: Hi, Mark.

Mark: Hey, George. How are you?

George: I’m doing well, thanks. Welcome to another session of our discussions about public value and public value theory. I’ve enjoyed the last couple and am looking forward to today.

Mark: Great, me too.

George: Today, what I’d like to dive into is this topic of goal hierarchies and this whole idea of the fact that complex challenges often have a lot of subplots, or things underneath them, or different angles on them that could be addressed in some type of social initiative or effort to bring about change or net positive value.

With that, I wanted to first start with a conversation about goal hierarchies, and then maybe if we get the opportunity, talk a little bit about how the team constitution may vary as we consider different aspects of entry points or places where we could actually look to take action.

Mark: Sure.

George: First thing I just wanted to throw out to you is you’ve thought a lot about goal hierarchies, and so I was wondering if maybe you could talk just briefly about some of what you see as the issues in goal hierarchies and maybe just get us into the conversation in terms of your initial impressions of goal hierarchies, maybe even what you think a goal hierarchy is.

Mark: Sure. I think we could start way back kind of at the beginning with the way in which I used the concept of public value. As you recall, when I talk about using the concept of public value and using it in public problem-solving, I’m taking advantage of certain features of the word value and features of the word public, all right? The features of the word value is that on one hand, there’s a very broad, abstract, general connotation of the word value, which is ethical values or moral values or philosophical values, or one might say the things that inspire people to want to do things. That’s the abstract idea of value.

Then there’s the much more narrow, concrete, utilitarian, economic idea of value, which is practical: concrete, cash on the barrel head, real effects valued in terms of existing currencies, et cetera. So you have this idea of value as values, which we all care about and aspire to, and then there’s this idea of value which is show me the value. One way to think about that is we’re drawing a vertical line, if you will, between something that is abstract and aspirational on one hand, and on the other hand, we’re talking about something that’s concrete and visible, all right? That naturally creates a hierarchy.

One might remember that there was a time when the federal government introduced a system of budgeting that was called program planning and budgeting. It was designed to have a whole set of accounting categories that would allow the government to give an account of what it was doing in a variety of different areas in a particular organization designed to advance a coherent mission. They constructed hierarchies that divided up the work of the organization, not so much in terms of the functions or activities of the organization, but rather in terms of whether they were achieving impact in particular areas, in particular ways and so we’re trying to carry that tradition forward.

Having said that, there’s this line between abstract and general on the one hand and concrete and particular on the other, people will just naturally do that. In fact, if you listen to conversations about people doing problem-solving, often they take the form of some person saying, well, wait a minute, we have to get the big picture and we have to remember what it is that we’re trying to do. That often is a bid to raise the level of conversation in the problem-solving group to a higher level of abstraction.

Then somebody will come along and say, oh, come on, we’ve done enough blue sky, we’ve got to think hard about what we’re going to do right now, tomorrow, and the next day, and let’s get concrete in particular about that, and that then moves the conversation down. The question is what’s in that hierarchy that goes from top to bottom?

It turns out that there are three quite different logics that connect the top, the part of the pure hierarchy of goals and objectives from the bottom part of the hierarchy of goals and objectives. You could put people have said mission, aspiration or aspirations, mission, values, goals, objectives, they use all of that language to describe the focus of the thinking that they’re planning to do, right?

George: Before you go into those three different areas, there’s a– Oftentimes people have a reason that they want to be at that higher level versus that lower level. There’s a reason that people like to stay at that high level that I’ve seen in certain city initiatives where we’ve been working. The reason they want to do that is because it allows many more people to be interested in the work.

Mark: Absolutely.

George: Because you’re not down at a level that is so concrete that people opt out. You’re still at an umbrella level which is level of the problem where they can still relate.

Mark: It’s naturally both more inclusive and more inspirational.

George: Yes, exactly.

Mark: If you’re looking for some glue that would engage people and hold them together, at least for a conversation and perhaps for action, you need some broader purpose that people say, yes, I’ll sign up for that and I’m happy to be a part of that. In fact, I’m excited about it because if I could achieve something big and significant like that, then I would feel better than if I’m just doing some tiny little thing that doesn’t seem to have that inspirational quality that I’m looking for.

George: Yes, and typically, mayors of cities want to stay at that level because it does have a wider appeal to the folks in the city, to the residents and so they’re really interested in staying at that level.

Mark: Yes.

George: Not that it’s actionable at that level typically, or at least it’s hard to see a near-term outcome that you could achieve.

Mark: I think something’s actionable at that level or not is something that actually has to be investigated and something that we might be able to go into a little bit. Notice that when you’re talking about level there, it’s important to distinguish between ends that are aspirational and changes in conditions that represent the concrete achievement of those operational goals.

George: Fair enough.

Mark: The things that we’re doing to actually try to produce those concrete but significant changes, and it’s that level at which the or it’s in those terms that these logics that connect the top to the bottom become important. One way to think about the level hierarchy is that we’re going from a description of conditions using very abstract and value-laden terms to using more precise empirical measurements that we can observe in the world and see whether they’re changing or not. Let’s think of that as the change from abstract to concrete. That’s an important dimension because the abstractions tend to be more inspirational, larger, but in order to figure out whether we’re making progress with respect to those big abstractions, we have to give an operational definition of that abstraction and find a way to observe it and measure it.

That’s part number one. Part number two is there’s this difference between general and particular. What general means is I’m describing a phenomenon that’s fairly, it’s either abstract or concrete, but it’s fairly broad and it includes many different things. I can, or it’s a big thing and I can describe what that looks like in aggregate. Specific would mean it would be a smaller category of action. The third difference is the difference between an ultimate end that is intrinsically valuable and a means that we think is valuable. Not so much intrinsically that is in itself, but as a means to achieve the changes that can be seen in concrete statistics, but also linked then to more abstract and more important values.

There are these three different logics. The logic of abstract and general to concrete and specific, of ends to means, and the last one I hadn’t mentioned before is short run versus long run. Short run could mean things that we can do in the short run versus things that we’ll either have to set off even starting to work on or things that we might have to start working on now, knowing that they will only produce a result sometime in the future because it’ll take a while for us either to develop the capacity or to have the capacity produce the desired effects that we can observe in the society.

We’ve got abstract and in general to concrete in particular, we’ve got ends and means, and we’ve got short run and long run. All of those things are, people will just naturally start talking about goal hierarchies using all of those categories to organize the hierarchy. It turns out to be really confusing that if you don’t think a little bit about which of those logics you’re following when you’re moving out, you’re in big trouble.

The other thing that starts happening then though too, is that you begin getting a hierarchy that is where we have more and more dimensions of value spread over a broader area and over a broader time horizon for any given problem. We start with a problem of homeless and we begin identifying different dimensions of value that are at stake there, including the economic problems that it’s creating for the city, the cost of taking care of the homeless, the question of the homeless people’s rights, a whole series of dimensions of value come into view.

Each of those trickles down and spread some more dimensions or characteristics that you’d like to be observing. You get this, it’s nice to describe it as a hierarchy and there is a logic that links lower pieces to higher pieces, but that logic is the logic that says ends versus means, short run versus long run, abstract versus general. All right? You got to a hierarchy or you get a bush depending upon how you want to think about it. Now the question is, why is this important?

George: Hey, Mark. Sorry, Mark. I just wanted to mention, just to jump in on this topic, is that your comment about it’s important to know which of these different approaches you’re taking to break down a challenge, I think you often find teams where people are using different approaches. Then secondly, even if they’re using the same approach, they may be using a different scope or they may be using a different timeframe and these things become very confusing.

Mark: Absolutely.

George: It’s really important when people make comments, is to actually anchor their comment in both in an approach and the scope and or timeframe that they’re using for that approach and people don’t like to do that, but it really is very important to do that. Back to you.

Mark: Yes, because I think that’s the whole point of it in some ways is that I watched groups struggle with this and I tried to construct all hierarchies and I discovered that neither groups nor I could make much sense of what was going on without paying attention at least to which of those, what particular logic we were using to divide the large problem into parts.

This is the next point. Why would we do all this work? The answer is what we’re trying to do is to take a big complicated problem that feels important to us and divide it into parts that we can work on. Get them more concrete, get them more particular, get them from the future back into the present, retaining the connection, if possible, to the large thing over the long run, blah, blah, blah, but also notice that it’s being divided into parts.

That’s where there are two important reasons to create a rich and thick and engaging goal hierarchy. One of them is that this is the apparatus that, in some sense, you’ll use to recruit and give guidance to people that you’d like to draw into the conversation. People will approach a problem and you’re trying to get them engaged and they say, well, what does this have to do with me?

You have to basically then show them what it has to do with them. That either as a person who’s affected by a problem or a person who’s a witness to a problem, or a person who’s being asked to contribute to the solution of a problem, they want to say, well, okay, but tell me what’s in it for me. What’s in it for me doesn’t necessarily just have to be a material advantage to them as we’ve discussed. It could be something that they care about, that they’d like to see for their children as a condition for their children in a variety of different things like that.

It’s the values that constitute their motivation. That’s an important piece of this. The more we can tap into people’s existing motivations and get them to appreciate that what they thought was unrelated to them and to their values is actually related to them and their values and that they might want to do something about it, the more motivational energy we’ll find on the political side of the strategic triangle and on the legitimacy side of the strategic triangle. Having a thick, rich display of the dimensions of value that are at stake in what we first nominated as a problem is an important way of getting people engaged in the issue.

The second reason it’s important is that it does allow you to begin dividing the problem up into parts. Now, this is where things get a little bit sticky as well, because imagine for a minute that, take the homeless problem, for example, the homeless problem might actually be an aggregation of four or five different problems. There might be the problem of people who are temporarily homeless. There might be the problem of people who are chronically homeless because they’re mentally ill. There might be the problem of people who are only temporarily homeless and are about to be able to make a particular shift.

You can imagine that as we begin observing the concrete features of the problem that we’re interested in, in some sense, the target that we’re trying to hit could get divided up into pieces. This is part of the analytic process where we’re looking for possible points of entry where we could have an impact, a large problem called homeless by picking up one piece of that problem for which we have a particularly well-designed intervention, or picking up the piece of the problem that we’ve missed in our previous interventions that we now come back to and want to get our hands on.

There’s a part of what’s going on when we’re constructing this goal hierarchy is not only with respect to the ends but also with respect to figuring out whether there are particular parts of the problem that we’re trying to deal with that are more important, more value-creating if we could change them because they’re more urgent, or whether they’re easier to handle because we have an available technology an that too then has to be brought into this.

Each component of the problem may have a slightly different relationship to the different dimensions of value. Some parts of the problem will make one dimension of value very salient. Another part of the characterization of the problem will make another dimension of value salient. The challenge then is to stare at the world with a particular kind of lens that comes out of this strategic triangle and the public value account that says I’m going to look closely at this problem and I’m going to try to imagine what all the things might be at stake in the problem the way I’m currently describing it. I want to try to construct an ordered array of those dimensions of value so that I know it’s at stake.

In addition, as I explore the concrete features of the problem, I’m going to start dividing it into parts and seeing how those parts are linked to the different values that are at stake alright? When I’ve gotten there, then I can begin thinking about what the interventions look like. I can begin thinking about the claims that are made on the resources of the society by the different interventions I have in mind to deal with the different parts of the problem.

Now, one of the consequences of doing all that, is that you get a pretty broad, skewed picture of public value. You’ve got component parts each of which are connected to that array of values in a different way. Now we’ve got a whole set of interventions where the interventions each have their own implications for the resources that are going to be deployed.

We’re suddenly in a world where one thing is that people are going to say either let’s go back up to the high level of abstraction because we can’t stay at this level of complexity, or they’re going to say, let’s grab onto one of these pieces and begin working on it. Both of those things are the right things to do, but before you do that, you have to try to make the judgment about, well, okay, now I’ve seen the array of values, the different components of the problem, the opportunities to intervene. I have examined what we’re currently doing with respect to those different elements so I have a picture of a portfolio of activities that are already in place. My important question, this is where the construction of the value proposition comes in, is if there’s some change I could make in the portfolio of things we’re currently doing that would be high value-added and low cost for the population to try.

What I’ve constructed for myself is a method of both imagining and initially evaluating or understanding better what we’re currently doing and imagining a possibility of what we could do better. That begins to lead to the action plan that says, here are the things that we ought to try. As soon as I get there, then I can begin actually identifying the particular actors I’m going to have to add to the team that would be effective in mobilizing a collaborative effort.

George: Before we get to the team though, which I do want to transition to here in a second, once we have this goal hierarchy which has an overarching potential outcome that you’re looking for but also various concrete pieces, whether that’s time-based or whether that’s a work breakdown structure or however you decide to construct that, it’s interesting that you say that you can now focus on an area where you can take action.

At the same time though, these two end up being in tension with each other. You mentioned it, but you really want to hold both of them out and maintain both. Even if you pick a piece, it’s often quite helpful to hold that umbrella-

Mark: Absolutely.

George: -in place because still allows people to stay interested and recognize that the piece is all in service to this larger umbrella of public value, but anyway–

Mark: It prevents you from doing something that’s trivial to do but also insignificant in its consequences, versus something that’s pretty hard but more important in its consequences because you manage to hold onto both the large and the small, the concrete, the abstract, the short term and the long term.

George: It’s very tricky when you start to manage the stakeholder environment because the interests- people have so many different interests around each of these areas, and they have short-term interests versus long-term. They have specific area interests versus larger domain interests, so it’s a very complex stakeholder environment, but having that picture allows you to actually relate to people and allow them, you can keep drawing them back to the larger umbrella. Even though you may be focused on something that’s smaller and may not be of interest to them, now you can still hold them in the conversation, hold them in the effort.

Mark: The other thing you can do is you can find pieces there of interest to some group and not another. Then what you can do is construct collaborative teams where they can operate to a certain extent independently. That is, they’re working on a relatively independent piece of this. What’s independent about it is the action we’re taking, not in terms of the way it contributes to the solution of the larger whole, but the action is independent, the construction of the effect, the aggregate result is interdependent.

You can keep people feeling like they’re a member of a team that’s accomplishing a large goal, even when their piece of it is small. It’s a way of– There’s a common saying now that says in teamwork, the most important thing is for each person to do their job. It’s true that we can take a team and divide it up into jobs and ask people to do it, but if we don’t keep reminding one another about how that individual job is related to the focus of the team as a whole, some of the motivation and some of the operational capacity begins going down because they get too narrowly focused and they begin fighting rather than coming back together and seeing how it is that they’re accomplishing the larger purpose together.

This is all about trying to figure out how to build motivation through values, political will through values, and capacity through taking particular operational pieces and going at it and having it aggregate up to a larger effect than anyone could do on their own.

George: Also, you bring up an important point about– Oh, one of the things, Mark, that you and I have talked about is a portfolio of actions.

Mark: Yes.

George: The other thing that this allows you to do is to think of a different portfolio of activity that may go on now. That portfolio could be totally independent efforts that are going on. A lot of cities, we talk, we have a program on cross-boundary collaboration where we ask people to narrow down to something specific that a smaller group could actually focus on.

One of the challenges is they step back and they go, well, if we just do that, it doesn’t actually achieve the outcome. What I say is, no, that’s fine. You may need to run some other initiatives outside of our program, but yes, they’re all in service to this bigger umbrella but you can’t bring a small group of people and expect them to be experts or to have the authorizing environment for each of the different work streams that you may be thinking of. It’s one of these challenges but it does also allow people to start thinking about a portfolio of activity that they may be taking in order to achieve the desired effects that they’re hoping to reach.

Mark: Well, if you go back and think about- put this discussion of but I think of as basically strategic thinking, which often leads you in the direction of having portfolios of interventions for complex public problems, and you put it back into its military context for a minute, you realize that what you’re trying to do is to aggregate capabilities in a context of a purpose and a will. That’s what the whole challenge is.

We used to have this discussion actually when I was teaching the strategic triangle to government executives. They would say this is a tool that’s appropriate for high-level presidents and governors and stuff, not us mid-level bureaucrats. I said, well, actually I didn’t think that was true and that I thought any individual in any location could use the strategic triangle to figure out how to make the most of the particular position that they occupied. I used to try to anchor that by telling them a story and the story was this.

We in the West owe a huge amount to the Greeks because the Greeks had this tendency, penchant really for asking awkward questions and trying to get answers to them. One of the questions they thought to ask themselves was what’s holding up the earth? You can see how they might ask that question because they knew what it was to fall and they weren’t falling and they couldn’t see anything that was holding up the earth. There weren’t any wires or supports or anything like that but there had to be something that was holding up the earth, right, otherwise they’d be falling all the time or we’d be falling all the time.

They thought about that for a while and many of you will know their answer, and it was typical of the Greeks that the answer was a strong man. Their explanation of what was holding up the earth was Atlas, a strong man holding up the earth so that none of us would feel like we were falling all the time. Everybody looked at one another and thought, well, that’s a pretty good answer. We’ll go with that one because it’s culturally consistent with the way we think about things and stuff like that.

Then somebody because they have this embarrassing way of asking additional questions, asked the next question, which is, well, now we have to answer the question what’s Atlas standing on? You have to know a little bit more classics to know the answer to that but they did give an answer to it and the answer was, he’s standing on a turtle or a tortoise. It makes sense. If it was a horse, he’d be bouncing around, the skin would be slippery. He would likely fall off, it’d be hard, but if you’re standing on a nice solid tortoise, you can do it, right?

That answer was good for about another 50 years or so, and then somebody thought to ask the next question, which is what’s the turtle standing on? At this stage, the Greeks understand which direction things were going in and they wanted to start thinking about other problems than this one so they gave an all-purpose answer, and their all-purpose answer was: it’s turtles all the way down.

In my view, when we’re trying to do a lot of these collaborative efforts, it’s turtles all the way down. That means that each turtle has a little strategic triangle thinking about value and support and capacity, and we’re trying to construct a process and a structure that can align all those turtles in an effort to make a bigger effect than we could if we didn’t do the work of authorizing each turtle to do its thing and then also constructing a structure around them that would allow them to move forward together.

That’s what an army does and an army uses hierarchy and training and stuff like that and the people at the top can make big mistakes. A liberal democracy is happier to distribute some of the responsibility for doing that. It lines things up in armies called departments of government and stuff like that and they get together but in the end, each of those sub-elements has to do its piece in association with and in knowledge of what the other pieces are doing and what they agreed to do together that would improve the total impact that they had and that’s what we’re after.

George: This whole analogy of turtles all the way down, and I know you’re relating to the strategic triangle and we’ll get into that at another time, but within the goal hierarchies, you’re just basically saying that there is this relationship between these different things that are happening and you need to consider each one of them.

Mark: It’s the recognition that big things happen through the accumulation of parts.

George: Right. Now, to do that, and as a city that might have a very complex issue and they create a nice goal hierarchy that at least gives a general understanding of how people can think about and talk about the issue as a group. It’s a judgment call, though, in terms of pulling together a logical group of– Well, let me be careful, it’s analytical, but it is a little bit of judgment as you think of which group you’re going to embark on, which group of activities will you embark on.

That comes back to where do I have the authorizing environment to have the resources, the permissions, the public spirit, and where do I have the operating capacity, which gets back to your strategic triangle, but that is a judgment call. How do you help people think about making that judgment call of how to focus and or what group of things to do? Is it always back to the strategic triangle?

Mark: Yes, I think that you always go back there, but you have to be a little practical too. What I think is important is to be self-conscious about the group you originally assemble to identify and diagnose and begin planning about the problem, thinking about it, and how that group develops over time as it goes from thinking about the whole or thinking about parts to acting on the whole or acting on parts.

What turns out to be important is to understand that what turns out to be feasible for a group to do depends an awful lot on the composition of those few. That’s true both in the thinking dimension and in the action dimension.

George: Let me jump in quickly.

Mark: Pardon me.

George: When you’re talking about these people in terms of what they can do both at the thinking and the acting, if we start at the highest level, what is it that you think people can do or what is it that you would propose that people can do at the thinking level and the acting level if you’re at the highest level?

Mark: Yes. I think if you’re at the highest level, you convene a group of people who have obvious interest in what it is that you’re trying to do, obvious capabilities to contribute, both in the form of both knowledge and the ability to act. All right? You put that group together and invite them to think about the problem. You let that run for a while and let them go through this process that we’ve just described, of identifying the dimensions of value, identifying the parts, identifying the points of intervention that can be made and see what we’re currently doing. That often means that the original group that’s doing the thinking has to reach out and talk to a large number of other people.

You could imagine that– one way to think about that is that that’s only contributing to the thinking and analyzing part of the problem, but it’s actually contributing to the acting part of the problem. Because in those connections and in those conversations, you are tacitly building a new capacity, collective capacity, to think and act together. What you want to do is build that group of people that’s thinking and acting together over time to be both broader and more incisive in its thinking and moving from mere thinking to action as we go along.

It’s like the building of a political movement, in some sense, more than it is the creation of a single structure right from the very beginning that you can use for project management purposes because at the outset you haven’t actually figured out the elements of the complex project that would be necessary to undertake to make a big difference. At any given moment, you could decide, look, we’ve done this enough. This is the group I’m going to go with. Now, they have the problem of figuring out how to think and act by themselves to get this job done.

The other thing to do is to say, no, no, you guys keep thinking and acting by yourself, but keep talking to me about who else you think we might need and what pieces of the problem we’re leaving out. That’s, again, this invitation of the people at the middle and at the more lower levels to keep thinking about what they might need if they were going to make a bigger impact than the one they were originally capable of, and who they would need to have in the alliance or the coalition or the collaboration, whatever you want to call it.

George: Mark, you just jumped from the high level down to the low level. What I asked you was, at the high level, if you bring a group of people together, what are the types of the work that they can do, and I think you immediately said, well, they’re starting to think of the challenge, they’re probably thinking of the goal hierarchy, they’re starting to establish conversations with a wider network that starts to build the capability to move forward.

When I look at it, I see that as they’re building out the goal hierarchy, the understanding of the problem, the understanding of the public value, and the interests of the various stakeholders. They’re starting to map out the contours of what’s possible. Then when you go down and you say, hey, there’s a smaller group that might go after a specific aspect of the challenge, that group can also look at what more could we do and surface that back up.

The bottom line is if it’s a really complex problem, and you mentioned people experiencing homelessness earlier, that could have a lot of different pillars within it that cut both vertically but also horizontally, where you could have people acting and you could have multiple initiatives going on that are still small initiative, but they’re big in their own, but they’re small in the scope relative to the overall umbrella issue that they’re focused on.

Mark: Absolutely.

George: I guess my interest is that larger group is creating the contours. Now, when they select something that might be focused on, then what is that group? What are you thinking that group is now either thinking or doing?

Mark: Well, I think that group has to be read into the overall strategy and why at this relatively late date, having launched on a major campaign, they’re being asked to do something, right? because they might have been sitting there thinking for a long time, we got this covered. What are these guys doing over here? You have to cope, say, we’ve just seen exactly where it is that you can make a contribution here and we’d like to talk with you now about whether we could increase the scale of that or improve the coordination of that with the other things that we’re doing.

When they do that, it would be helpful if they had the license from the boss to go and have that conversation and then start doing the work together. If they don’t have a common boss, which would often be the case, then they might have to engage in a process of negotiation and contracting and making an agreement together about how they’re going to handle this problem. Then you’ve got this, the original group is gradually growing, but what you’re hoping is that a lot of imagination and initiative is being brought to the effort by the people that were originally outside the group and are now part of the group.

George: Yes. Great. That’s where the group that figured out the contours began to scope down some specific areas that might move from thinking to acting. You’ve selected a group that’s now going to probably take a little bit more on the taking action side, and now there’s an interplay that starts going on between the group that was looking at the contours, the group that’s taking action and they may be different people. There may be some overlap, but they may be totally different people.

Mark: Exactly.

George: It’s challenging. It’s a very complex–

Mark: It’s a process of constant invention. The important thing is to stay alert and to keep looking at what the overall objectives were. If you knock off one thing and you’re making progress in some area and you say, okay, well, now we can go on to this other area over here. I think that if we adapted that idea to the many circumstances that we face, that we’d would be better off than always trying to marshal these large armies and do a fixed thing. That we’ve had a way to constantly authorize lots of people to solve problems. This is where I get to the idea of needing an army of value creators. Part of being a good value creator is paying attention to what the other guys are doing and what you could do that would make a contribution to them.

George: What do you, just as the last question, what’s the mechanism that you use to help people either self-coordinate and/or keep in touch with one another and/or understanding if some of those downstream effects are actually happening?

Mark: You know the answer to that because it’s actually this thing that we’ve been talking about, which is the public value account that you keep bouncing up against and seeing yourself in that and saying to yourself, am I doing my part in this in a way that’s useful? Part of what, that’s the only mechanism is having a structure of purposes that’s challenging and open and can recognize and provide resources to people that are moving the ball forward.

George: In a very short bit, can you just remind people of what the public value account is, but really short?

Mark: Yes. The public value account is essentially a description of the important dimensions of value that are at stake in a problem that some collective is taking on as something they think would be an important problem to solve. We’ve talked about the importance of having that public value account include many different dimensions. We’ve also talked about the importance of as one learns about the problem and begins to formulate both a possible strategy of intervention, then one begins moving from the abstract and general to the concrete in particular, to the means as well as to the ends, and from the short run to the long run, and one has then a picture of where one could make a contribution.

That’s, in some sense, an important and compelling invitation that you’d like to send out broadly. In a situation where you don’t have command and control over everything, or in a situation where you think you have that, but you really don’t, or it even wouldn’t even be valuable to have that because the different circumstances are so great, having that invitation, the picture of the possibilities in front of you, is the thing that might motivate people and guide them and motivate them to act individually and to coordinate with others and to guide their coordinated action.

George: If I’m understanding you correctly, if I think of goal hierarchies and I think of the public value account, you might have a goal hierarchy that’s set up but at each of the milestones or as activity is happening, you’re hoping to see effects that are registering on that public value account.

Mark: Correct, and you can see places where you’re not making progress, places that you’ve deliberately set aside, and you’re in a position to hold people to account, but you’re also in a position to learn as you go along. The public value account is a very fluid and dynamic environment and the pure logic of the value hierarchy is very demanding and probably, in the end, ultimately, impossible to get exactly whatever that would mean, but as a social process, the construction and updating and maintenance and redefinition of the public value account is essentially a very useful tool for helping drive a large group forward when you’re not exactly sure what’s going to turn out to be the right way to go and where you’re trying to mobilize lots of activity that is still sufficiently considered in relationship to the other things that you don’t end up tripping all over one another.

George: Mark, not to hit a sensitive area here but if you saw a team pick an entry point, if a team never establishes a public value account and understands the various dimensions of value, but they just pick something and say, hey, we want to pick something because we want to figure out how to work together, where do you see that being problematic?

Mark: I see it being problematic primarily in terms of it’s a self-deception because it’s saying you get all the benefits of articulating a big problem and saying you’re on the way to a solution, but you don’t really have that. You’ve picked something that was narrow, that allowed you to get going and stuff like that and you tell yourself that over the long run that if this works, we can go on and do another thing, and that may be true and it might be important, but it’s important for me to be a responsible actor that you check that out.

I think an awful lot of the– You can fail in a lot of social movement or social problem-solving efforts in two different ways, three different ways. One is that you could articulate the problem and never find any action that made any difference at all. All right. That would be one way to fail. The other way you could do it is find a big problem and identify an action that would deal with one component of the problem but would leave other components of the problem unsolved or miss an opportunity to make an intervention that was more highly leveraged than the one you did on all components of the problem, all right?

The third possibility is that you have an idea and it’s pretty well worked out, but nothing ever happens, right? You can end up with an empty aspiration. You can end up with an intervention that pretends to be the large aspiration but actually isn’t and people gradually get discouraged and dissatisfied, or you could just simply spend all your time thinking and never acting, and all of those things happen fairly often. [chuckles]

George: Well, there’s a lot of different methodologies to think about acting against problems, and so it’s just interesting to think through why you stand behind public value and what you think it offers that those other methodologies may not.

Mark: Well, there’s one thing that it offers which is a lot of the ways that we talk about designing public policies is that we use the phrase of a value chain or a value proposition, or a theory of change or economists talk about production functions for producing particular results. Those are all words that we use to describe the link between operational capacity on one side and the production of value on the other, and that’s the material side, and in order to make that operational and simple, people often truncate both the dimensions of value that they’re monitoring, right?

They begin planning to produce an effect that captures only some portion of the values that are at stake. It often is narrowly focused on one point of intervention when a portfolio might turn out to be better, right, so that in the investigation of what we might do to improve the problem, we don’t accurately represent the dimensions of value and we aren’t imaginative enough about how we could find different points of intervention. That’s on the operational capacity to the value side.

The bigger contribution, I think is on the political side because the only source of energy and money and effort is to essentially attach an idea about value that people would like to pursue, that they value enough that they’re willing to give up money, give up some status, give up some effort, work hard under uncertainty work hard with people they don’t particularly like or trust. The only way you can get that to happen is to have a framework of values where people say, oh, yes, I remember why I’m doing this.

It’s important to me and it’s important to our society and I want to stay with this even though I’m only working on a piece of it, and working on a piece of it, I’m having to struggle. On this note too, the other thing is to say that there’s two different ways that one could approach the problem of solving a problem. One is that you can begin with the problem and figure out what’s the best way to solve it without being particularly concerned about either the existing context or your position in that context, right? Or you can start with an actor, and the actor could be an individual, or it could be a team, right?

Then if you start with an actor and a team and you ask the same question, which is, what could this actor and this team in this particular context best do to have an impact on problem A, which would register in dimensions one, two, three and four, then that’s already a constrained problem, all right? You want to fight a little bit against the constraints, but you got to accept the idea that this is the people that we’re going to war with, if you will, right, is the people on this team and they have certain capabilities, right? That becomes as important a constraint on the decision about what we’re going to do as the character of the problem and the underlying causes and all that as well.

If you start with the actor then, and you say, okay, we made a decision about the actor that’s constrained, now let’s figure out what the hell we can do. That’s a very different question than let’s start with the problem and figure out how to construct the actor that could deal with the problem. In any case, what you’re going to get is what an actor that you’ve been able to mobilize can do. You’re not going to get anything more or less than that.

George: Excellent. Well, Mark, I appreciate taking the time today to look at goal hierarchies, to talk about them, and to talk about how they ultimately come back to value creation as referenced to the public value account, and obviously, the sidebar of team composition and thinking through the different activities at different levels of that hierarchy. Well, thank you, Mark. I look forward to us chatting again in the near future.