Introduction
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Healthy marriage and relationship education (HMRE) grant recipients and providers of similar services often face implementation challenges that limit their ability to effectively serve participants. When faced with these challenges, it can be hard to know how to move forward. With the right improvement framework in place, providers can draw on organizational strengths to get unstuck and move forward.
Rapid cycle learning is an improvement framework that service providers can use to develop and test targeted improvement strategies to address programmatic challenges, with the goals of strengthening their own services and generating lessons for the field. These methods can be incorporated into HMRE service providers’ existing approaches to continuous quality improvement (CQI). This essay provides information from HMRE grant recipients participating in the Strengthening the Implementation of Marriage and Relationship Programs (SIMR) project. In the SIMR project, 10 HMRE grant recipients partnered with researchers to use rapid cycle learning to address common implementation challenges. Together, HMRE grant recipients and the SIMR team identified a priority challenge, identified the root causes of a challenge, and developed strategies to address the challenge and its root causes.
In this essay, staff and leaders from the grant recipient organizations that participated in SIMR share tips for conducting rapid cycle learning. The essay provides an opportunity to learn from HMRE grant recipients about their experiences with rapid cycle learning and get their advice on how others can enhance their organization’s improvement approach.
Purpose
The essay aims to help other human services providers understand and use rapid cycle learning techniques to address their key challenges. It shares grant recipients’ perspectives and advice for conducting rapid cycle learning, based on their experiences in SIMR. Through video interviews, grant recipient staff share what they consider the key ingredients of success for addressing challenges using rapid cycle learning.
Key Findings and Highlights
Grant recipient staff identified the following key ingredients for successful use of rapid cycle learning:
- Orient your team towards improvement. Adopting a mindset of continuous improvement includes reexamining existing practices and being open to change. An orientation toward improvement helped grant recipients to be more open-minded to trying new or different ideas to solve key implementation challenges.
- Find and focus on your team’s most important goal. Identifying a clear and motivating goal helped grant recipient teams foster a stronger team dynamic and kept all staff on the team engaged for the duration of the improvement effort.
- Make space for innovation. Making space and time to discuss improvement efforts helped them more quickly and effectively respond to challenges, determine next steps, and monitor ongoing progress. Structured meeting time in SIMR provided teams with the opportunity to hear from all staff and draw on multiple perspectives to shape improvement decisions.
- Collect and use data to inform improvements. Collecting feedback from staff and participants allowed teams to continuously tweak their strategies rather than waiting several months to deem a strategy successful or not.
- Overcome the fear of change. Engaging in rapid cycle learning, with its emphasis on starting small and learning from failure, gave grant recipients space to be innovative and try out ideas they had considered in the past but had not implemented. According to grant recipients, the rapid cycle learning approach gave them the push they needed to try out a new strategy and learn to adjust it.
Methods
The Learn, Innovate and Improve (LI2) framework guided the work in SIMR. LI2 is a three-phase program improvement framework that providers can use internally to guide internal continuous quality improvement efforts or use within research partnerships to build evidence for the field (Derr et al. 2017).
As part of the SIMR study, Mathematica and Public Strategies worked with HMRE grant recipients to address key implementation challenges using rapid cycle learning. Rapid cycle learning is a method for quickly and iteratively testing strategies to strengthen implementation of programming that is used in the Improve phase of LI2. It often involves conducting successive cycles to pilot strategies, collecting feedback from staff and participants on how these strategies are working, and gathering data to demonstrate whether the strategies are supporting improvement. Based on what service providers learn, staff can refine and test strategies again in a subsequent learning cycle.
Citation
Buonaspina, A. R. D. Piatt, H. Gordon, K. Hunter, D. Friend, S. Baumgartner, and R. Wood. “Lessons from Rapid Cycle Learning with Healthy Marriage and Relationship Education Grant Recipients.” OPRE Report #2023-054. Washington, DC: Office of Planning, Research, and Evaluation, Administration for Children and Families, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, March 2023.