What to Do if You Are an Implementer Trying to Convince Your Team to Apply Implementation Science
By Dr. Sobia Khan, Director of Implementation
7-min read
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We hear that many of you (like us) see the potential impact of using implementation science and practice, and think it holds the answer to many of our implementation problems. Perhaps you have taken some courses and workshops (including TCI’s repertoire of online offerings) and feel pretty good about how you will embed the knowledge you have gained into the work that you do. But then bring these new ideas and approaches to your team and hit roadblocks. You realize that not everyone on your team is as excited about implementation science and practice as you are.
This scenario is incredibly common – in fact, it’s probably one of the most talked about points in our Implementing Change Community and the Q&As / coaching sessions that we hold as part of the community and our courses. Sometimes people feel that one of the first barriers to implementation in convincing their internal planning teams to use implementation science and practice.
How to support team members to adopt implementation science and practice
So what can a keen implementer do when their team isn’t on board? The answer is to treat the use of implementation science and practice the same way you would treat any kind of change implementation in your organization. When you truly deconstruct it, using a new approach to implementation requires changes in practice, and sometimes in higher organizational processes such as roles, procedures and strategy. You can take what you know from implementation science and practice and apply it to implement implementation science and practice. Here are some key tips and considerations.
1. Get a good sense of the values people bring to their approaches to change (e.g., what type of change management approaches do they use) and their ideas of success.
Having this conversation can help you talk to your team about how implementation science and practice is a good fit for the work you are doing. For example, if people value equity and want to ensure that change efforts are tailored and sustained, then you can highlight how certain methods in implementation (e.g., understanding barriers and facilitators, selecting tailored change strategies, making adaptations) fit with their values and ideas of success, and that the way you approach implementation can be adapted to serve the needs of your team and organization (e.g., adding in more upfront engagement to enhance equity, merging components of implementation with quality improvement so that the new approaches are embedded in current processes etc). Just like you would assess the fit of any change that you are planning on implementing and would make adaptations to that change to ensure there is alignment with your team and organization, you would also do the same when you introduce implementation science and practice as a key change.
2. Define WHO needs to do WHAT differently in order to use implementation science and practice on the team.
Making a change is a lot easier when you understand exactly what needs to be done differently and what the magnitude of change is. For example, if you approach your team and say, “we need to use implementation science in our next improvement initiative”, there is a chance you will be met with blank stares and maybe even scowls. If you say, “we can use implementation science to enhance what we are doing by adding a simple readiness checklist, embedding a barriers and facilitators assessment step in our existing project meetings, and by adapting our change strategies, and these people can be responsible for each of these steps – let’s discuss”, this makes the scope of change a lot easier to grasp. Define exactly what it means to do things differently, and this can help curtail some awkward conversations and make change more tangible.
3. Understand people’s barriers and facilitators, and use strategies to help people overcome their barriers and leverage their facilitators.
Often what we label as resistance to change is actually a set of barriers to change that deeply tap into people’s capability and motivation. We also have to provide opportunities to change. Talk to your team about what is difficult about making the identified changes. The solution might be as simple as “we don’t know what you are talking about” in which case you can provide training opportunities, or divert them to training opportunities. The solution might also tap into things like pessimism about the need to use a new approach, or uncertainty about the benefits of the approach, for which you might introduce your team to examples of other teams that have used implementation science and practice, and how it has benefitted them. Ultimately, you need to know why people aren’t on board with change and what they need to help them get on board.
The same considerations can also be made in scenarios where you are trying to convince people to do something specific. For example, I was recently in a situation where I felt like a readiness assessment step needed to be embedded into the process. In this situation, it wasn’t that I needed to introduce the whole idea of implementation science and practice, but one piece of the puzzle. Through a series of conversations, I was able to gauge people’s idea of success related to “meeting people where they are” and ensuring sustainability, helped them recognize how knowing readiness aligns with their mental models, proposed an easy set of questions derived from the Readiness Thinking Tool as “what” that they need to do differently, and talked with them about their barriers to using the tool to help support them to do so. Overall, change is hard, and changing to create change adds to the difficulty of using implementation science and practice. However, we can take we know and use it to help us navigate through complexity of our work.
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