Table of Contents
I recently attended an ANZSOG CEO workshop where I was particularly encouraged and interested in the work of Harvard University academic Mark Moore on public value. Moore (1995) offers the notion of public managers creating public value for society (for the short and long term) for strategic management in Government. Drawing on Moore’s definition, public value is understood to be the achievement of favoured outcomes by the use of public resources in the most effective manner available (Moore 1995).
In this presentation, I would like explore the idea of using a management process called the ‘Three Frames’ to deliver innovative public value. During my public service career, I have had the opportunity to work in a number of different agencies. I have served as Director-General of four Queensland Government Departments – Main Roads, Education, Employment and Training, and Primary Industries and Fisheries. I am also the Government champion for Lockhart River – a remote community in Cape York.
Each department and the community presents its own set of challenges, diversity and opportunities for creating public value. Some significant results for public value ranged from completing roads projects such as the Pacific Motorway in Main Roads to shaping the Learning, Skilling and Work agenda for Employment and Training and the creation of the Lockhart River fishing company.
In a case study by Dr Kerry Brown and Christine Flynn on the Queensland Department of Main Roads, they concluded that:
The integration of relationship-building with high quality technical service delivery (at Main Roads) gives new insight into public sector management strategies, as traditional internal strengths were built on at the same time as efforts to broaden and enhance organisational capabilities in different ways.
In all of these cases, my focus has been on creating the purpose and mission of these organisations to shape their identity.
I developed the Three Frames management process and successfully implemented this in the Government agencies where I have served as Director-General—most recently, the Department of Primary Industries and Fisheries (DPI&F).
While it can be described as a management tool, the Three Frames process is not limited to management in a purely business sense. It is a methodology, or a philosophy, that can be equally well applied to personnel management or to the way in which agencies such as my own can deliver on government priorities and meet the many challenges we face daily.
One such challenge was the response to the recent oil spill in Gladstone Harbour where a fuel tanker on a bulk carrier from Korea was ruptured when it was hit by a tugboat in Gladstone Harbour on 24 January 2006. For around 40 minutes, the ship’s fuel spilled 25,000 litres of heavy fuel into Gladstone Harbour, creating a slick.
Apart from the immediate environmental impact, this oil spill had the potential to have a long-term economic impact on the local fishing industry – contaminating prawns, crabs and fin fish, making them unsuitable for sale, and destroying local breeding grounds. The immediate environmental and economic impact would also have significant social implications for the local community.
The Department of Primary Industries and Fisheries was charged with ensuring that the impact on the fishing industry was minimal and that the local community supported the actions the department would take to remedy this situation. Our response was based on the Three Frames approach with the aim of creating public value. This involved having a clear understanding of the desired outcome, connecting the people and organisations involved and identifying problems and responses together.
This approach can be applied on our general business operations. Each day, the operations of public sector operations consume public resources and produce real consequences for society. Moore provides the idea of a strategic triangle with the intersection of legitimacy and support, public value and organisational capabilities as essential elements in this outcome. He challenges public managers to imagine and articulate a vision of public value that can command legitimacy and support and is operationally ‘doable’ in the domain for which they have responsibility.
This framework helps us, as public managers, to connect what we believe is valuable, and requires public resources, with improved ways of understanding our public value. I believe that there is a strong congruence between Moore’s premise and the Three Frames methodology – of performance, relationships and alignment to create innovative public value and leadership of strategic management in Government.