When’s the last time you played the game telephone? Remember how inevitably, the original message ended up completely different by the end of a bunch of people hearing and then communicating what they thought they heard or remembered? That is the main lesson of a newly emerging field called implementation science. It says that people and organizations, or groups of people, tend to profoundly underestimate the resources required for a good idea to actually become realized in a way that is not just recognizable, but truly has fidelity to the original idea. But why is this so? Research in implementation science suggests that one must first understand what might be untested, or falsely assumed, in order to accurately assess the array, quality and chronology of resources necessary for implementation to have a prayer of happening.

For example, when thinking about afterschool program quality, is it enough to create and train and give people a really great activity toolkit? No! Why not? Because there are often many, many barriers, or more fundamental problems, that need to be solved first.

Often an intervention of support can strategically be best built by working with a program supervisor, as learned in work I was involved in with the Youth Work Learning Center at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee with Dr. Cheryl Baldwin.

Recently I’ve been leading a group of coaches in afterschool in a process called Community of Practice, and have begun designing a similar process focused on trauma-informed practice in a medium sized midwestern city. As a community of practice in afterschool, people can identify needed supports, collectively problem-solve, and build or advocate for strategies that eliminate those telephone game barriers.