Strategic Change Leadership in the Disability Services Space: Balancing Social Impact and Economic Sustainability Priorities

There has been a decades-in-the-making transformation of how high social impact services are delivered across the developed world, brought about by the belief markets can more efficiently deliver services than systems based on the traditional welfare model. Given the challenges this poses for nonprofit disability and mental health service organisations in Australia, a search of the management literature was conducted to better understand these phenomena. It was discovered that, although there are many studies that examine the tensions leaders must resolve while working within a market system to balance social mission and economic sustainability priorities, little is still known about the strategies organisations implement to successfully balance these two priorities, particularly the strategies of organisations that operate predominantly in the nonprofit sector. It was also disappointing to learn that the field of strategic management has barely considered the consequences of these tensions, despite being so well placed to do so. However, the field has, nonetheless, still produced many noteworthy lessons, albeit indirectly. The most apposite of these were used in this paper to develop three potentially very powerful frameworks: (1) The Level of Diversification—Stage of Development Matrix, (2) The Stakeholders’ Propensity to Commit—Risk of Failure Matrix and (3) The Disability Services Provider Organisational Life-Cycle Framework. Taken together, managers and scholars working in the disability services area can use these frameworks in a variety of ways, including to identify how disability service providers can pursue positions of strategic industry leadership. The chapter concludes with a brief discussion of its findings.