Reach in Logic Models and Spheres of Influence

January 26, 2011

A European conference related to performance planning and reporting in the public sector has noted two important contributions made by PMN and S Montague in a paper titled ‘Three Spheres of Performance Governance: Spanning The Boundaries From Single-Organizational Focus Towards A Partnership Network’. The two important insights were noted in a paper by Petri Uusikylä and Ville Valovirta prepared for the European Group of Public Administration (EGPA) 2004 Annual Conference – Four Months After: Administering The New Europe, September 1-4, 2004, Ljubljana, Slovenia.

Uusikylä and Valovirta conclude:

One of the important insights made by the Canadian public management developers… The reach describes the groups of beneficiaries, clients, users and recipients at whom the outputs are targeted. According to Montague (1998) the logic models which do not make a reference to who and where the action is taking place, suffer from three key problems. First, they lack the sensitivity to the impacts on different participant groups. There is also a great potential to confuse outputs and outcomes – the problem which we noticed already as regards the logical framework approach. Third, the account of the trade-off between the reach and the results remains often underdeveloped. Too ambitious results are often expected since the customer reach has not been identified.”

“Another great insight made by the Canadians is the division of the performance objectives and measures into three spheres of influence (Montague 2000). The first one is the operational sphere over which the managers have a direct control. The second sphere is one of behavioural change over which the managers have a direct control. Here the question is how our actions modify people’s actions. The third sphere the environment of indirect influence, affected by the change of behaviour. What the model does is that it impersonates the rather mechanistic approaches of performance management by employing the concept of reach and by acknowledging the different degrees of influence in the three spheres.” The online version of this article can be found at: http://evi.sagepub.com/content/13/4/399