Understanding the Human Services Value Curve
In the rapidly evolving landscape of human services, organizations continually strive to enhance their impact and reach. The Human Services Value Curveis a model that delineates a strategic pathway for growth across four distinct but interconnected horizons. Each horizon represents a progressive level of outcomes, impact, and social value, tailored to address increasingly complex societal needs.
Below you will find an introduction to the concepts involved with the Value Curve, to help you build your understanding of the framework, and how you can apply it to your organization.
Progressive Levels of Impact
The Horizons of Value
At the core of the Human Services Value Curve is an intentional focus on growth, charted on four horizons, each of which represent a progressive level of outcomes, impact, and social value. The horizons are described in brief as:
HORIZON
evidence-based approaches to achieving compliance.
The focus: Supporting and helping people and families in critical need via an organization that can delivering customer-friendly and cost-effective programs that adhere to evidence-based policy and program rules, processes, and regulations.
HORIZON
Stability through cross-organizational cooperation and tailored services.
The focus: Helping people and families gain stability via multiple organizations that collaborate across programmatic and organizational boundaries to deliver an optimally tailored mix of services to the customer.
HORIZON
Addressing root causes with innovative, seamless solutions.
The focus: Achieving sustainable social and economic mobility for people and families via an integrated system of services that co-create novel services and solutions that address the root causes of challenges and opportunities.
HORIZON
Creating flourishing communities with collaborative ecosystem approaches.
The focus: Generating equitably flourishing communities via an ecosystem of organizations, machines, and services that seamlessly design and deliver solutions for multi-dimensional socioeconomic and population-level challenges and opportunities.
The horizons of the Human Services Value Curve are fluid and dynamic – meaning that most organizations and systems have an array of services and programs at each horizon and the capabilities at each level mutually reinforce and enable continuous improvement throughout the entire model. As an organization becomes more Collaborative, Integrative, and Generative, the newfound learning and competencies acquired at each horizon cycle through to bolster foundational Regulative capabilities
This strategic integration across horizons promotes the maturation of human services organizations, enabling them to deliver wider, more valuable, and equitable results.
As an organization becomes more Collaborative, Integrative, and Generative, the newfound learning and competencies acquired at each horizon cycle through to bolster foundational Regulative capabilities
Adapting & Enabling Growth
The Advancement Levers
As you traverse the horizons of the Human Services Value Curve, there are four Advancement Levers that bring dynamic capacity at each horizon. These levers adapt to and enable the growth orientation that leads to ever more valuable outcomes and impact.
The Advancement Levers are described in brief as:
Organizing resources and designing systems to improve interactions across services.
This lever represents the connection between a human services organization’s outcomes focus and its design. It includes the blueprint for how resources are organized and allocated, and in particular, the supporting structures, systems, and processes necessary to facilitate interactions between organizations, services, and constituents.
Using data to understand needs and assess the effectiveness of services, informing policy and transformation.
This lever sets how a human services organization understands and responds to information on individual, family, and community-wide needs for services and solutions. In addition, this lever represents data-led evidence on the effectiveness and efficiency of services in order to inform policy, capacity, and overall service transformation.
Co-creating solutions with stakeholders to meet community needs and innovate service delivery.
This lever captures how a human services organization co-creates and designs solutions with customers and stakeholders in order to optimize outcomes. This lever also charts the policy change and service innovation that improves the capacity and agility to respond to changing community-wide needs with new forms of services and outcomes.
Developing skills and fostering a culture that supports innovation and agility.
This lever represents the knowledge, capabilities, competencies, and roles individuals and teams need to deliver services and outcomes. In addition, this lever addresses fostering talent in order to develop and sustain a resilient, innovative, and agile environment, along with the cultural dynamics that underpin capacity and performance.
When the Advancement Levers are combined with the Horizons of Value, the resulting increase in growth enables the human services organization and system to mature and deliver broader and more valuable and equitable outcomes and impact
Like the horizons of the Human Services Value Curve, the levers are also mutually reinforcing and enable learning and continuous improvement throughout the entire framework. When combined, the resulting increase in growth enables the human services organization and system to mature and deliver broader and more valuable and equitable outcomes and impact.
Now let's explore the Horizons of Value and Advancement Levers concepts in more detail.
