Research School Network: Bringing Implementation to Life: Starting with Enablers Identifying the enabling mechanisms that already exist to improve implementation

I often use the pre-mortem strategy as a means to identify potential barriers in implementation. It’s a collaborative approach, where different stakeholders outline all the ways that something might go wrong (or rather has gone wrong, imagining a disastrous outcome¹). Once you have this in place, you plan implementation activities designed to mitigate against disaster and tackle some of these barriers.

In this blog I’m going to propose a new technique, a useful counterpart to the pre-mortem, one we might call the ​‘pre-vita’.² In this approach we still reflect before implementation, but here we identify the enabling factors that already exist – those that can make something come to life and thrive.

Starting with enablers

Beginning with the enablers rather than the barriers allows us to celebrate where implementation has been successful in the past, and we can lean into this. We should be looking for:

• The places where we already demonstrate the behaviours that drive effective implementation: engage, reflect, unite.
• The structures that are already in place and work well; these can support implementation.
• The right people: those with expertise, knowledge of effective implementation, and credibility to enable change.
• The values, norms and attitudes in the school that can act as guiding principles and communication tools for implementation. Implementation needs to be grafted onto these to bring it to life.

People who enable change

This quotation from Helen Bevan resonates with me because implementation has to be a collaborative process, and it will succeed or fail based on who is involved. While there are many barriers that might arise when we consider people (capacity, knowledge, motivation), I always find that people bring so much to the process, far more than a job title or role.

People bring:

• Intervention specific knowledge
• Ability to make changes to systems and structures.
• Representative voices from stakeholders
• Early adoption or championing with experience of implementing in one context
• Capacity, or the ability to direct capacity towards implementation

Our schools are full of people with a wealth of expertise. I wonder how much of this remains untapped in the process of change. For example, when people move roles, they still have the existing expertise from previous roles. We can still use it. It may be closer to hand than we realise. See our blog on engaging people for more.

Structures that enable change

When we reflect solely on the barriers to implementation, we end up trying to come up with new structures to make things work. Shiny new processes or artefacts have a magnetic attraction. We feel duty bound to generate. When we start, instead, with enabling structures, we ask: what do we already have in place that will help make this a success? According to the EEF’s implementation guidance, structures can be:

• school structures such as timetables and groups;
• logistics and processes, for example, data monitoring systems;
• resources such as funding and equipment;
• time, for example, set meeting time;
• policies, for example, MAT, local, or national policies; and
• roles, for example, implementation teams.

Many of these things are well-established, well understood, so they can be enablers as well as barriers. They can give us a smoother run-way or fertile field. Using our example of implementing coaching trust-wide at Dixons, we know our most important enabling structure is our timetable; it literally enables our coaching meetings and protects them in the day-to-day.

We should never ignore the barriers to implementation, but solutions often already exist. Try a pre-vita to bring them to the fore.

¹The most impactful pre-mortem will follow this approach as advocated as a method of risk assessment by Dr. Gary Klein.

²Thanks to Mark Miller for coining the pre-vita phrase.