In conclusion, performance measurement plays an essential role in creating public value through effective strategic management. The work of developing and improving performance measurement systems involves philosophical and normative as well as scientific and cognitive issues. Every time I make a claim that something is valuable, and therefore worth measuring, I make a philosophical/normative claim, not just an empirical/positive claim. Performance measurement is about value. Necessarily, then, performance measurement has important political dimensions beyond its obvious administrative and technical dimensions. This has to be the case because the only place a manager can go to get guidance about public value is the political authorising environment.

The obvious way for a manager to initiate and carry on a dialogue with the political world is to ask those in the political authorising environment what they think is valuable. If managers can engage their political overseers in serious, sustained discussions about the definition of public value, or the publicly valued dimensions of performance for their organisations, then they might be able to come to some conclusions about the definition of public value. Engaging in such a discussion, however, might well expose the manager and his organisation to criticism, and to the risk of a real, objective failure to produce what the public wants.

There are only two things that might motivate a manager to begin working in this risky and murky terrain – to take up the challenge of defining and recognising the creation of public value with the input and oversight of the political authorising environment. The first is that by doing so, one might emerge with a stronger, clearer, more consistent definition of the public value one is being asked to produce. The second is that one might call into existence the conditions under which one can successfully manage and lead one’s organisation.

What finally compels managers to construct the systems that will allow them to recognise public value is that it is impossible to live up to the duties of their offices if they do not know what they are trying to produce in sufficiently concrete terms to know whether they are succeeding or not, and if they do not have the measurement tools that allow them to drive performance and seek out the technical means for continuing improvement. Only the strategic use of performance measurement makes such things possible. However, engaging in the task of constructing performance measures always means confronting unresolved conflicts. In the end, it means exposing ourselves and our organisations to potential failure. In the face of that, we might fall back in alarm. The only thing that moves us forward is the knowledge that we cannot run organisations without really understanding what constitutes public value and how we contribute to its creation.