Super Strategies: A New Category of High-Impact Implementation Strategies
By Dr. Sobia Khan, Senior Director
4-min read
Super strategies are implementation strategies that fulfill multiple functions and address several change determinants at once, giving them outsized potential to drive implementation success. The Center for Implementation identified this new category as part of a recent expansion of our StrategEase strategy list.
The Center for Implementation recently updated a list of implementation strategies to expand these beyond the current ERIC list as part of the revamp of our StrategEase process and tool. Why did we do this? We felt like an expansion was needed — many of the partners we work with were looking for strategies like social strategies (e.g., to build trust and balance power) and system-level strategies that align with the scope of their role. You can read more about the expanded list of strategies.
As part of this work, we aligned strategies with a revised list of functions to clarify the strategy’s underlying purpose and the individual and contextual determinants of change, ensuring that strategy selection is guided by theory. In doing this, we discovered a new category of strategies called “super strategies”.
What are “super strategies?”
Super strategies can fulfill different functions and address multiple change determinants, thereby having the potential to create stronger shifts in implementation work. While it is typical for one strategy to address a few different determinants — for example, an education session can build knowledge, but if structured a certain way, can also provide opportunities for modeling — super strategies are even more diverse and can act as important facilitators of change.
Super strategies for individual-level change
When linking strategies to functions and determinants at the individual level (where the adapted Theoretical Domains Framework (TDF) was our chosen determinant framework at this level), two top super strategies emerged: team debriefing and storytelling.
Team debriefing is defined as “dedicated time for the team to reflect on an episode, event or experience to describe what happened, successes and challenges, and develop a plan for future performance”. It has been shown in some studies to be effective for a variety of purposes — for example, fostering better team relationships, facilitating collective action planning, and supporting the emotional burden of change. In fact, we found that team debriefing can fulfill four different functions of strategies and aligns with eight determinants in the TDF.
Similarly, we found that storytelling, which involves “understanding and communicating experiences in ways that align with how humans think and feel, and that tap into people's beliefs and values,” also fulfills four functions of strategies and aligns with seven TDF determinants. This is because storytelling can help us communicate and understand beliefs, support us to learn something new, tap into our identities surrounding the change, and help us feel optimistic about change (among other things!).
Super strategies for contextual-level change
When we linked strategies to contextual determinants using the Context Compass Framework (CCF) as our determinant framework, the super strategies that emerged included: foster ownership and commitment, and develop shared guiding principles or purposes.
Fostering ownership and commitment fulfilled three different functions and aligned with eleven CCF subfactors, while developing shared guiding principles or purposes fulfilled three functions and aligned with nine CCF subfactors. In reflecting on how contextual strategies operate, these types of strategies often aim to foster the enabling conditions for implementation. While traditional strategies tend to focus on resource building to ensure capacity for implementation, in theory and in practice, the ones that tend to give us more “bang for our buck” are strategies that honor the humanness of implementation – we work collectively, and we need to feel like the work aligns with who we are and that we are a meaningful part of it. These strategies can help foster better relationships, enable leaders to become better leaders, and can help shift an initiative up the ladder in terms of priority, among other things.
Learn more about individual and contextual change strategies in our Level 2 course Context at Scale.
Explore the courseThe Ultimate Super Strategy: Engage Others to Be Involved in and Support the Change
Of all strategies, there was one strategy that ruled them all, that emerged in the top three of both individual and contextual level strategies: engage others to be involved in and support the change. This aligned with five different functions and thirteen determinants across the TDF and CCF. Why is this such a super strategy? First, we included this strategy on our list because it needed to be specified as a key action that facilitates equitable implementation. Second, the act of engagement and involvement taps into the humanness of implementation that we described above — for example, this strategy can foster better relationships, balance power, strengthen commitment and improve communication channels.
The bottom line: How to use super strategies
There are other examples of super strategies, but team debriefing, storytelling, foster ownership and commitment, develop shared guiding principles or purposes, and engage others to be involved in and support the change are the ones that linked to the highest number of functions and determinants in our mapping work.
For researchers, super strategies open up a new area to explore: why do certain strategies tap into more functions and determinants than others, and can that be predicted ahead of time?
For practitioners, the takeaway is simpler. When selecting strategies, people often panic at how many options they could enact. Super strategies offer a way out: choose fewer strategies that address more determinants, and commit to enacting them well.
A lesson for us at TCI is that the strategies that emerged as "super" are rarely the ones people default to, like education sessions. Most super strategies center on people and connections, which speaks to the heart of implementation work: it's not just about building capacity, it's about building engagement.
You can find the full set of super strategies, along with the functions and determinants each one addresses, in StrategEase 2.0, our tool for planning theory-informed implementation strategies.
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