Vizualizing & strategizing public value : Make it visible, make it public !

Value creation has been a critical element of strategic management since the 1980's (Porter, 1985). In the mid-1990s, Moore (Moore 1995; Benington & Moore 2010, 2011) introduced this concept into public management. Since then, public value (PV) has become a central focus for public management scholars (Bryson et al., 2014a; Meynhardt, 2009, 2015, Crosby, Hart & Torfing 2017). Recently, concern about strategizing and assessing public values throughout a strategy-as-practice lens became a novel topic of the field (Huijbregts, Bert & Bekkers, 2022). While the concept of strategic tools-in-use (Spee & Jarzabkowski, 2009; Jarzabkowski & Kaplan, 2015; Desmidt & Meyfroodt, 2021) has proven effective in strategic management, insufficient attention has been paid to the development of such tools for public management with a strategy-as-practice perspective (Whittington, 1996). This gap could hinder efforts to strategically manage and implement public values. To develop legitimate and meaningful public policies that serve the common good, it is essential to understand how decisions are made based on both shared and divergent values. This article explores visual strategic tools—specifically causal maps—and their potential to make public values explicit and visible. Our research question addresses how stakeholders involved in public projects can use these tools to visualize and strategize public values. Public Value Paradigm (PVP) emphasizes the creation of public values specific to the context (Bryson et al., 2014a). It responds to contemporary challenges by promoting a long-term vision for the relationship between the public sector and society (Meynhardt, 2015). PVP aims to place democracy at the heart of decision-making, advocating for participatory approaches that involve citizens and stakeholders in public discussions (Moore, 1995; Bryson et al., 2014a; Meynhardt, 2015). To enhance debates around shared and conflicting values, visual tools such as causal maps can play a key role, as they help to unveil public values (Cumming & Wilson, 2003) and to identify "emergent strategizing" (Eden & Ackermann in Huff & Jenkins, 2002). Further exploration of their potential to visualize and strategize public values is needed, especially empirically. To address this challenge, we conducted an action research project (Lewin, 1951; Huxham et al., 2000; Hatley et al., 2016) in a municipality in southern France around a participation process involving a wide range of various stakeholders. However, during this process, significant resistance emerged against fully visualizing public values. Participants felt betrayed by discrepancies between promises and reality. We found that while causal maps were useful in visualizing public values for strategic purposes, a parallel and surprising process of "invisualizing" certain values occurred, which undermined the democratic and participatory nature of the process. This experience led us to conclude that the use of visual tools like causal maps enable to sustain debates and gain reflexivity about public values but can also be used to identify what could prevent the emergence of a better governance and public management.