Training insight teams to turn evidence into recommendations

The question

A food company’s insight function wanted one skill shared across its teams: bringing structured and unstructured evidence together into recommendations the business could act on.

Its leaders planned a pilot with their own team, then a wider rollout across countries. A skill like this is easy to teach for a day and harder to keep, so the course had to feel like the company’s own work and hold up on live projects.

Our approach

The course was built from stories of the company’s own projects, gathered by a small group inside the business with a shared template, so people practiced on their own evidence.

The leadership team took the pilot first and reviewed it with us before the course was built out for other teams and regions, so the people who would champion it shaped it, and coaching then took the same way of working into live projects.

What the team came away with

Insight leaders had a course in their company’s own material, tested on their own team and ready to adapt for each new audience.

Every team gained one shared way to move from a body of evidence, in any mix of formats, to a recommendation, and a common language for discussing one with colleagues in other functions.

Coaching put that method to work on projects already under way. A written capture from one coaching workshop gave its team a record of how the evidence had been brought together, ready to build on when the next question came and to show colleagues how a recommendation had been reached.