A new study in Implementation Science Communications highlights the“champion paradox”: while implementation champions help drive and sustain evidence-based practices, organisations can become overly reliant on them, creating risks when those individuals leave.

The following is an interview between Elvin Geng, Editor-in-Chief of Implementation Science Communications, and Hannah Stark, co-author of the study.

Elvin: Thank you for your recent paper and congratulations on getting it published!   We want to highlight some of the papers we publish for a little more visibility, so thank you for providing some thoughts about yourself and your work for this blog!

As you know, champions are a commonly used strategy.  They are thought to leverage existing social forces to push organizational change. Yet the idea of champions remains conceptually and empirically understudied. Much of the literature treats champions as present or absent but is only beginning to theorize about mechanisms and to empirically test effects. I think this paper will help advance the conversation. Thank you for writing it!

Elvin: Before we dig into the paper, first tell us a little about yourself. Where are you in your career stage and how did you get interested in implementation research?

Hannah: I am a postdoctoral research fellow at the REEaCh Centre at the University of Melbourne, where I undertake research about the implementation and sustainment of the Abecedarian Approach Australia (3a). 3a is a set of a set of teaching and learning strategies that support families, educators, teachers and carers to have warm, responsive interactions with young children, and is underpinned by over 50 years of research that shows a range of long-lasting benefits for children and families. I have been fortunate to do this work alongside my colleague and co-author Professor Jane Page, who has spent over forty years in the early childhood sector, and has played an influential role in shaping the quality of pedagogy and practice in early childhood in Australia and internationally.

In addition to my research, I have practised as a speech-language pathologist for the last 15 years. My clinical background is central to how I came to use implementation science in early childhood education and care. Working across different health and education systems, I found myself becoming increasingly interested in knowing more about how evidence-based programs can be implemented and sustained where they are needed most. The question of why good programs don’t stick, even when practitioners believe in them and children clearly benefit, is what drew me to implementation science. I completed a Specialist Certificate in Implementation Science at the University of Melbourne in 2024 and have been integrating implementation science into my research in early childhood education ever since.

Elvin: I’m excited about your progress and it sounds like there is a lot of growth in Australia of implementation science as well. It’s wonderful that you have practical hands on experience with implementation as well as formal training – it’s a good combination. Now, let’s turn to the paper. Can you take me back to the moment when you first started to suspect that there might be a “paradox” in how champions operate?   Was there a particular case, quote, or incident in your data that crystallized the idea of the champion paradox for you? 

Hannah: A paradox, at its core, is when two things that seem contradictory are both true at the same time. That is what we found when we spoke to our participants about champions and 3a. The very qualities that make champions effective can, under certain conditions, create fragility in the systems around them.

The paradox emerged quite early in our analysis. We were speaking with people who had dedicated years, in some cases more than a decade, to sustaining 3a in their organisations and communities. What struck us was how frequently their narratives centred around a particular person, or champion: someone whose presence had genuinely shifted the trajectory of the program, but whose departure had changed things again.

One participant described program knowledge becoming “whisperings”, something that diminished and became “a bit less intentional” as it passed between people after a champion left. That image stayed with me. These were organisations with real commitment and real expertise, and yet so much of what held the program together was residing in individuals rather than in systems. The paradox is not a criticism of those individuals; it is an observation about the structural conditions around them.

Elvin: You adopted a critical realist stance. This is an ontological positioning that I think implementation science needs to more fully embrace. How did you take that perspective, and how did that choice practically influence how you designed the study and interpreted the data? 

Hannah: Critical realism allowed us to take seriously both what participants described experiencing and the possibility of underlying mechanisms generating those experiences. In this study, we weren’t just describing beliefs about champions. We wanted to understand what might be operating structurally within these organisations over time.

We first looked closely at how people in different roles described the same processes, and where there were convergences and divergences. At a second level, we looked across all three cases for patterns in reported events: repeated cycles of retraining and program visibility shifting when a champion changed roles. Those cross-case patterns were then used to hypothesise what mechanisms might be operating. The critical realist framing also helped us to position the champion paradox as a provisional explanatory theory, which frames how it should be used in practice.

Elvin: You mention using replication logic across three different cases. What convinced you that these mechanisms were not just case‑specific quirks?

Hannah: We spoke with key people from three different organisations. We approached these organisations because, despite having the common experience of sustaining 3a for a long time, they were quite diverse: a metropolitan not-for-profit provider, a state government initiative across remote communities, and a cross-sector government-led program. The role of the champion also looked quite different across these settings. In one context, the champions were educational leaders. In another, they were coaches working across dispersed remote sites.

What convinced us was that despite those surface differences, the underlying dynamics were consistent. Knowledge concentrated in a small number of individuals rather than becoming embedded in organisational systems. Organisations became reliant on those individuals for functions well beyond their formal roles. Champion effectiveness limited the pressure or urgency to build alternative infrastructure. That pattern of replication across different contexts gave us reasonable grounds to propose these mechanisms as theoretically meaningful rather than incidental.

Elvin: I have been wanting to make sure that our findings published in ISC is also immediately accessible to practitioners. If you had to explain the champion paradox to hospital leadership in a couple of sentences, how would you describe it?

Hannah: As we were describing the champion paradox, we realised it would likely be relevant to people across many sectors and settings.  I might say it like this:

The people who are most effective at driving an evidence-based program forward can, unintentionally, become the reason the program is fragile. Because those individuals carry so much of the knowledge, motivation, and problem-solving capacity, the organisation never quite develops those capacities for itself. When a champion leaves, you don’t just lose a person; you lose the scaffolding that was quietly substituting for a system.

Elvin: Is there a risk that the language of “paradox” could be read as being anti‑champion? How would you want readers to guard against that misunderstanding?

Hannah: The argument we present is not that champions are problematic. The people we spoke with who had taken on champion roles had often carried enormous personal commitment and responsibility and were deeply committed to the work. Champions are essential, particularly in the early stages of implementation when momentum is fragile and expertise is scarce. However, champion-dependent models, without deliberate investment in system-level capacity, can generate sustainability risks that are only seen when circumstances change. If anything, I hope the framework prompts greater organisational responsibility for building the infrastructure that champions are currently doing so much to compensate for.

Elvin: Looking to the future, what do we need to turn our attention to? Do you think we can develop indicators or measures would help capture the distinction between “champion‑dependent” and “system‑dependent” implementation? Looking back, is there anything you would design differently in a follow‑up study specifically focused on champions?

Hannah: Factors we found in this study that have the potential to help assess whether there is champion dependency at play include: how widely program knowledge is distributed across staff; whether documented processes exist for knowledge retention and transfer; and whether organisations have demonstrated capacity to maintain program quality through personnel transitions. Because champion effectiveness can mask underlying vulnerabilities, sustainability measures may also need to include stress-testing: looking back at what happened when champions have left their roles or using scenario-based approaches to evaluate organisational responses to hypothetical champion departures.

There is still much to be explored in program sustainment and the role of champions. There is scope to look at network mapping and to delve deeper into how organisations can transition from champion-dependent to system-driven sustainment, and the conditions that enable this. We’re certainly thinking carefully about this in the early childhood space and will look forward to sharing what we find!

Elvin: Thanks so much for talking to me today!  And best of luck with your future endeavors!

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