Successful Implementation May Be More About Activation Than Transfer

Practice is busy. New evidence-based programs compete for attention. Maybe it is time to rethink the pipeline metaphor and use system science to consider how problems and potential solutions are sustained in context.

In our November Implementation Science Seminar, Emeritus Prof Penny Hawe describes how system thinking makes “the background” into “the foreground”. Ethnographic methods, narrative analysis, network analysis and causal loop diagrams can help researchers and practitioners articulate local dynamics and try to harness them for betterment.

Penny Hawe, Emeritus Professor of Public Health, Menzies Centre for Health Policy and Economics, Sydney School of Public Health.

Penny Hawe started her academic career at University of Sydney. From 2000 to 2010 she was the Markin Chair in Health and Society at the University of Calgary where she created a large-scale program of work on the difference that complex systems thinking makes to the theory, methods, ethics and economics of population-level preventive interventions. In 2013 she returned to the University of Sydney part time, bringing a focus on system thinking to the establishment of the NHMRC Australian Prevention Partnership Centre (now part of the Sax Institute). She continues to advise on projects in the UK and US.