In his cross-listed Harvard course (Graduate School of Education and Business School), Strategic Finance for Nonprofit Leaders, James Honan draws on Mark H. Moore’s work, Creating Public Value: Strategic Management in Government, to provide students of school leadership with the Strategic Triangle Model for strategy development.
The Strategic Triangle Model prompts leaders to organize their thinking in these three interdependent areas:
- Legitimacy & Support – With respect to what Moore calls the “authorizing environment,” leaders need to prove to key stakeholders the legitimacy and then garner their support in making change. To this end, leaders and teams must answer: What key stakeholders will we need to engage to successfully implement our initiative and meet our goals? Whereas the process begins with identification of key stakeholders, beyond this core question, leaders must also, of course, consider when and how to engage them.
- Organizational (Operational) Capacity – To identify critical resources required to execute the new initiative, leaders and teams must answer: What leadership, management, and administrative/operational resources need to be in place to successfully implement our initiative?
- Value – So that leaders can design backward from their intended outcomes and performance metrics, they must lastly answer: What public value will we create as a result of the successful implementation of our initiative, and how will we measure that value? Identifying the value of the intended changes provides leaders and all stakeholders with a North Star toward which they will design, navigate, and implement change.
Substantive and transformative strategy comes as a result of an intentionally considered and constructed system of interdependent components. Leaders who take the time to craft strategy—using tools that might include, but, of course, not be limited to—The Strategic Triangle. And including a team of key stakeholders in the completion of a framework such as this—as well as throughout the change-leadership process—increases organizational investment, the diversity of critical perspectives, and the efficacy of outcomes.
