What value are you to society? It is a question that all public organisations should be able to answer. Missions are written to inspire. They are rarely written to withstand questions about what would be lost if the organisation stopped existing tomorrow.
Public value is a way of answering that question. TKD advisory uses it with government, not-for-profits and mission-driven enterprises alike — organisations for good, whatever their legal form — to establish what value they create for society, who authorises them to create it, and whether they are built to deliver it.
Public value entered public administration through Mark Moore’s work at Harvard in the mid-1990s, as an answer to a specific problem: private firms have a measure of whether they are succeeding, and public organisations do not. Public managers have no equivalent signal, which makes it possible to be busy, well-funded, and quietly failing.
Moore answered that public managers should be judged on whether they create value for the public, and that this requires attention to three things at once — often described as the strategic triangle: is it valuable to society, is it legitimate and supported by the people and institutions the organisation depends on, and is it operationally feasible to deliver.
These three must hold together. Valuable work without authorisation stalls. Authorised work without capacity disappoints. And capacity applied to something nobody has reason to want is the most expensive failure of all.
Public value is usually taught as a public sector concept. TKD advisory applies it deliberately more broadly, as the public sector cannot do everything — social entrepreneurs, non-profits and philanthropic organisations also add value to the public.
Any organisation that asks society to support its mission is making a public value claim. A charity with deductible gift recipient status is supported by forgone tax revenue. A social enterprise with a government contract is delivering on a public mandate. Each of these is an authorisation, and each carries an obligation to substantiate the value being created.
It makes the mission decision-usable, specific enough to settle an argument about priorities. It exposes where the authorisation is thin — usually with a stakeholder the organisation has stopped talking to. It gives funders and investors something to hold on to, since the questions they ask about impact are public value questions in different language.
Public value is not a template to be applied. The work is structured, but the content comes from the organisation.
Establishing the public value proposition. What value is created, for whom, and on what basis — usually through interviews inside and outside the organisation, and usually revealing a gap between the two.
Testing the authorising environment. Who authorises this organisation to do what it does, and does that authorisation still hold? This is where uncomfortable findings tend to appear, and where they are most useful.
Examining operational capacity honestly. Whether the organisation is built to deliver what it claims, or whether the ambition has outrun the structure.
Increasing public value can require different engagements, depending on the issue:
A scoping review, when the organisation knows something is not holding but has not yet named it. A strategy engagement, where the public value proposition becomes the basis for direction rather than an add-on to it. A governance review, where the question is whether accountability structures match the value being claimed. An evaluation or impact framework, where public value defines what should be measured before anyone chooses indicators. Or a stakeholder engagement design, where the authorising environment turns out to be the real subject.
Interested in examining what your organisation is for and how you can improve that?
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