Public managers face a persistent paradox: the problems demanding government attention grow more complex while the resources available to address them remain stubbornly finite. Budget constraints, staffing limitations, and political headwinds conspire to make ambitious policy goals feel perpetually out of reach. Yet some agencies consistently punch above their weight, delivering meaningful outcomes despite operating under the same constraints that paralyze their peers.

Mark Moore's strategic triangle offers a diagnostic framework for understanding this variance. The model posits that sustainable public value creation requires simultaneous attention to three interdependent dimensions: the substantive value your organization produces, the authorizing environment that grants legitimacy and resources, and the operational capacity that enables delivery. Most agencies default to focusing on whichever dimension feels most urgent—typically chasing political support or scrambling to maintain operations—while neglecting the strategic alignment that transforms constraints into opportunities.

The framework's power lies not in its elegance but in its diagnostic precision. When public managers understand their position within the strategic triangle, they can identify which dimension represents the binding constraint and direct attention accordingly. In resource-scarce environments, this clarity becomes essential. The agencies that thrive under constraint aren't those with the most resources but those with the sharpest strategic vision about how their limited resources create value that matters to the stakeholders who control their fate.

Strategic diagnosis begins with honest assessment across all three dimensions of the triangle. Substantive value concerns what your organization actually produces that citizens, elected officials, or society would genuinely miss if it disappeared. This isn't about mission statements or statutory mandates—it's about the concrete benefits that flow from your organization's existence and efforts. Many agencies struggle to articulate this clearly, confusing outputs (permits processed, inspections completed) with outcomes (safer buildings, protected consumers).

The authorizing environment encompasses the constellation of actors whose support you need to operate effectively. This extends far beyond your immediate political principals to include legislative committees, oversight bodies, media outlets, organized stakeholders, and increasingly, networked publics who can mobilize attention rapidly. Understanding your authorizing environment means mapping not just who these actors are but what they value, what threatens them, and how they perceive your organization's relevance to their concerns.

Operational capacity represents your organization's ability to actually deliver on its value proposition. This includes obvious elements like staff expertise, technological infrastructure, and financial resources. But it also encompasses less visible assets: institutional knowledge, established relationships with implementation partners, regulatory authority, and organizational culture that either enables or impedes adaptation. Capacity constraints are rarely absolute—they reflect choices about deployment as much as raw availability.

The diagnostic question that separates strategic thinking from mere planning is identifying the binding constraint. Which dimension, if improved, would most dramatically enhance your organization's ability to create public value? Agencies often misdiagnose this, investing in capacity improvements when their fundamental problem is political legitimacy, or seeking additional authorization when they lack the operational capability to use existing authority effectively.

A useful exercise involves rating each dimension and then testing those ratings against evidence. If your capacity were doubled tomorrow, what would change? If you suddenly enjoyed enthusiastic political support, what would you do differently? If your substantive value proposition were crystal clear and compellingly communicated, would resources and support follow? The answers reveal where strategic attention should concentrate.

Takeaway

Before pursuing any new initiative, map your position on all three dimensions and identify which one, if strengthened, would most multiply your impact—that's where your strategic energy belongs.

Political support in democratic systems is neither freely given nor permanently secured. It must be cultivated through deliberate effort that recognizes the diverse motivations of authorizing actors. The strategic error many public managers make is treating the authorizing environment as a monolithic entity to be persuaded rather than a coalition to be assembled from actors with distinct interests, time horizons, and influence mechanisms.

Effective coalition building begins with stakeholder differentiation. Some authorizers care primarily about substantive outcomes—they want the problem solved and will support approaches that work. Others prioritize process values like transparency, participation, or procedural fairness—they may accept suboptimal outcomes if they believe the process was legitimate. Still others focus on distributive consequences—who benefits, who bears costs, which communities or interests gain relative standing.

The sequencing of coalition building matters enormously. Approaching skeptical stakeholders before you've consolidated support among natural allies can generate early opposition that becomes entrenched. Conversely, building too insular a coalition risks legitimacy challenges when excluded groups mobilize. Strategic coalition architects identify pivotal actors—those whose support or opposition will influence others—and sequence engagement to create momentum rather than resistance.

Maintaining coalition support over time requires attention to what might be called the political maintenance function. Authorizers need periodic reinforcement that their support is warranted—evidence of impact, stories of beneficiaries, transparent acknowledgment of challenges and adaptive responses. Agencies that treat political support as a one-time acquisition rather than an ongoing relationship eventually discover their coalition has evaporated precisely when they need it most.

The tension between building political support and maintaining program integrity is real but often overstated. Compromises that fundamentally undermine substantive value ultimately erode political support as well, because stakeholders eventually recognize when they're being managed rather than served. The goal is not capitulation to political pressure but strategic responsiveness that maintains substantive integrity while demonstrating respect for legitimate concerns.

Takeaway

Map your authorizers by what they actually value—outcomes, process fairness, or distributive effects—and sequence your engagement to build momentum with pivotal actors before approaching skeptics.

Operational capacity is conventionally understood as a means to an end—the machinery that transforms resources into outputs. Strategic thinking reframes capacity as a source of leverage in its own right. An agency's demonstrated ability to deliver becomes an argument for expanded authority, additional resources, and broader political support. Capacity becomes its own authorization strategy.

This reframing has practical implications for how agencies invest in capability development. Instead of building capacity to meet current mandates, strategic managers build capacity that positions the organization for future opportunities. This might mean developing expertise in emerging policy domains, cultivating relationships with implementation partners who will become more important, or investing in data infrastructure that enables demonstration of impact. The question shifts from "what do we need to do our current job?" to "what capabilities would make us indispensable?"

Operational excellence as political communication is an underutilized strategy. When agencies execute difficult tasks well, they generate political capital. High-profile successes create constituencies of beneficiaries and admirers. Conversely, operational failures—even in marginal programs—can devastate an organization's standing across its entire portfolio. This suggests that strategic capacity investment should attend not just to aggregate capability but to managing variance: ensuring that highly visible operations receive sufficient resources to avoid failures that would undermine broader organizational legitimacy.

Capacity constraints often reflect organizational choices that have calcified into assumed limitations. Legacy systems, established procedures, traditional skill profiles, and inherited structures may have made sense historically but now impede strategic repositioning. Asking "why do we do it this way?" and "what would we do if we were starting fresh?" can reveal opportunities to redeploy existing resources toward higher-value applications.

Collaborative capacity—the ability to work effectively with external partners—deserves particular attention in resource-constrained environments. Agencies that can leverage partner capabilities multiply their effective capacity without proportional resource increases. But collaborative capacity is itself a capability that must be developed: it requires skills in negotiation, trust-building, contract design, and joint accountability that don't emerge spontaneously from traditional bureaucratic training.

Takeaway

Treat demonstrated operational excellence as political communication—every well-executed initiative builds the credibility that earns you the authorization and resources to do more.

The strategic triangle's enduring value lies in its insistence that public managers attend simultaneously to what might seem like competing demands. Substantive value creation, political authorization, and operational capacity are not sequential challenges to be addressed in order—they are interdependent dimensions that must be managed in dynamic balance. Neglecting any one dimension eventually undermines the others.

Resource scarcity paradoxically increases the importance of strategic thinking. When resources are abundant, organizations can survive misalignment between their value proposition, political support, and operational capacity. When resources tighten, only those organizations with tight strategic coherence survive intact. The agencies that thrive under constraint have clarity about the value they create, cultivation of the support they need, and capability to deliver on their promises.

Strategic management in the public sector is ultimately about making choices—about what value to prioritize, which coalitions to build, where to invest limited capacity. The strategic triangle provides a framework for making those choices consciously and coherently rather than reactively and fragmentarily.