Training insight teams to turn evidence into recommendations

The question

Insight leadership wanted one skill built across its whole function: combining many sources of evidence, structured and unstructured, into recommendations strong enough to guide major decisions.

Those recommendations then had to reach the functions that act on them. With teams in many countries, the skill had to travel well, and it had to last once the training was over.

Our approach

We built the course from the company’s own work, so people practiced on evidence from their own business.

We gathered ten of its projects from teams across regions and divisions, each written up by the person who ran it. They became the worked cases at the heart of the training.

The people it was for helped make it. The pilot ran with the senior insight team, who shaped the material as they used it, and a revised version followed.

We adapted the course for different audiences and regions, including a session for marketing. In one region, local consumer data on a live topic became the case.

The program’s second year added coaching on live projects, so teams could put the framework to work on the briefs in front of them.

What the team came away with

The company had a course built from its own projects, and coaching that applied the same framework to live work, with a written capture after each session.

In one coaching workshop, a team applied the framework to its existing documents from many markets. The capture set out nine conclusions, each traced to the documents behind it.

Insight leaders had a way of working their teams could take to any body of evidence, in any market, and a course built to be adapted again.