Get to ACTION to transform health in your community with PoP Health's action planning framework

I have an extra hop in my step and a desperate desire to GET. THINGS. DONE. (Currently at the top of my home list is tackling a round of Spring cleaning, beginning with our completely out-of-control basement…but I digress).

How about you?

In our work with community coalitions, getting to ACTION is often a major pain point. So let’s dive right in.

What do you mean by action planning?

Sometimes it’s easier to start with what I don’t mean, and this is one of those times.

Action planning is not information sharing. It’s not learning. It’s not defining your strategy. It’s not writing a plan or a report.

These can all be important components of action planning, but only as a means to an end. And that end is intentional, purposeful action. What are you doing and what tangible change in your community is it associated with?

We’ll get more into specific strategies for action planning in our next newsletter, but for now, let’s wrap our minds around what action planning is.

What are some ways to think about action planning?

There are a bazillion action planning frameworks and templates out there (and so many acronyms! SWOT, PDSA, SMART, the list goes on).

How I feel about them is best captured by the quote “All models are wrong, but some are useful.”

Here at PoP Health, we’ve waded through the action planning acronym soup on many an occasion, and where we’ve landed is here: our own action planning framework (hot off the presses!) - uniquely tailored to collaboratives and coalitions seeking to transform health in their communities through policy and systems change. As with any other model, there are ways in which it will be “wrong” - but we also believe (and can vouch for from experience!) that it is useful.

And while I always hesitate to throw yet another framework out into the world, this one has arisen naturally from our work over the years, and represents our best effort to synthesize many hard-learned lessons as we’ve navigated this space side-by-side with community coalitions and collaboratives.

Introducing PoP Health’s Action Planning Framework

• Grounding Phase: First and foremost, root your action planning in a deep and shared understanding of: the community and key actors; your collaborative’s unique value add and mission; and the nature of the problem(s) and root causes(s) on one end and desired outcomes and vision on the other end.

• Brainstorming Phase: Once you are grounded, brainstorm with abandon. Get the most outlandish, impractical ideas out there. Get the most exciting, transformational ideas out there. Get the most narrow, incremental ideas out there. Get the most bizarre, eyebrow-raising ideas out there. And everything in between.

• Prioritizing Phase: After you have brainstormed with abandon, niche down. You simply cannot be everything to everyone or do everything. Be ruthless in prioritizing - you must make hard choices to do some things and not do others. Make those hard choices based on all that you’ve grounded yourself in in the grounding phase, plus other key criteria your collaborative defines collectively.

• Planning Phase: Only once you have prioritized can you truly plan. This is where you define the exact what/when/how/where/who of it all. Get specific. Where you are exploring, start small - consider pilots and minimum value products. Where you are confident in what works, focus on scaling up.

• Acting + Iterating Phase: Now you are ready: Just do it. Then iterate. Don’t get stuck in the prior phases or spend too long in them. Ultimately, we won’t learn nearly enough until we take action. So just do it - but know that you will need to iterate. Be prepared with the structures/systems needed for continuous quality improvement/responsive feedback, and know the basis on which you’ll decide whether something is working or not (more on evaluation and learning to come in future newsletters!).

What questions should I be asking myself about how we action plan?

• Is your action planning grounded in your collaborative’s UNIQUE value add? What can you do that others are not doing and cannot do? What gap can you fill?

• Who are the targets and agents of change who hold the power/authority/influence to make the changes you are seeking? Are they around your collaborative table during the action planning process? If not, should they be? If not, how will you influence them?

• Have you created a safe space for action planning to occur? Have you unearthed and addressed power dynamics, political constraints, and other conditions that might impact the level of honesty and engagement collaborative members and community members bring to the action planning table?

• Is your action planning process taking into account the realities on-the-ground? When the rubber meets the road, all kinds of roadblocks arise - have you anticipated them and do you have a plan for addressing them? Are there some roadblocks that are - at least for now - insurmountable, and thus require rethinking what actions make sense to undertake?
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These are tough questions, and getting to action is no easy task. But if your collaborative can move through these phases in a thoughtful way, you can chart a path to inspiring and mobilizing concrete, meaningful action and transforming health in your community. Here’s to taking the first steps down that path - remember, just do it, then iterate. More on HOW to move through these phases in our next newsletter!

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