Considering the Role of Relationships in Implementation: The Relational Pathway
By Dr. Julia E. Moore, Executive Director, and Dr. Sobia Khan, Director of Implementation
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Implementation requires people to work together. It's inherently a very social process. Therefore, when planning change efforts, it’s essential to not only consider the technical aspects of implementation (e.g., StrategEase Pathway, and using theories, models, and frameworks), but we also need to think about the relational aspects of implementation. That’s why we created the Relational Pathway.
The Relational Pathway is designed to help you think through the different ways that implementers support change efforts, with a particular focus on the social aspects of enacting change.
The Relational Pathway: Social aspects of implementation support
The Relational Pathway includes 5 elements:
Convening
Partnering
Governance
Working as a team
Working across a system
The Relational Pathway: Convening
Convening is a logical place to start in the Relational Pathway. Usually, implementation starts with a person or a community or an agency of some sort who's bringing others together for the purpose of implementing “the thing”. The role of the convener (which might be a single person but is often a collection of people) is to identify and link together multiple people or groups who have a vested interest in the work. But bringing people together means considering and dealing with power and trust dynamics that impact how people work together.
The Relational Pathway: Partnering
The next logical step is partnering. Partnering is about how you decide roles and types of contributions to the work. For example, are you thinking of having all groups serve as equal partners? Are you working collaboratively and co-creating or do some groups have more of a consultation role (i.e., reviewing and providing input)? This is also where you start thinking about relationship building or maintaining or leveraging existing relationships. It could be that you have people around the table who you've worked with before, or you might start developing new relationships in order to do the implementation work.
The Relational Pathway: Governance
A huge part of partnering is governance, which is why we pulled it out as a specific step because there's so many decisions that need to be made along the way when you're implementing. Who is going to lead the implementation team? Who is going to be making decisions? What form of leadership and what form of decision-making is appropriate for your implementation initiative? These are the kinds of decisions you might to make, and it really impacts implementation when you think about how decisions are made and who's leading what.
The Relational Pathway: Working as a team
Once you’ve established these foundational pieces – convening, partnering and governance — then you can get into thinking about doing the work. How are you going to work together as a team? How are you going to handle the relational dynamics within the team? As you work through implementation activities (e.g., assessing barriers and facilitators, planning for adaptations and sustainability), you have the opportunity to think about trust and power, and how they impact your team and how you are doing the work. Note that it’s also important to consider fairness.
The Relational Pathway: Working across a system
Many implementation efforts are larger than the work of one team and one organization, which means that you also work across a system (e.g., with other organizations, funders, governments, communities, researchers, etc.). When working with so many people across a system, it's important to understand the dynamics between your team of implementers and the other groups and organizations. What is the historical context? How have you worked together in the past? What has worked well and what hasn’t?
While the Relational Pathway is focused on the perspective of the implementation team, there are other ways to consider the social aspects of creating change, such as by thinking about them at more of a systems level.
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