The Insights 101 Playbook: A Dynamic Learning Starter Kit

"Consider insights as the distillation of the formative research, that allows you to include the research findings in the design."



This Insights Playbook is an introductory guide to one of the key building blocks of dynamic social and behaviour change (SBC) project design: research insights. The resource has been designed to offer concise and practical guidelines with examples - from identifying insights to applying and sharing them across project partners.



Insights form part of the Social and Behavior Change (SBC) Flow Chart, a process developed by the Breakthrough ACTION project to develop effective SBC activities. The Flow Chart process is designed to actively and meaningfully engage end-users and stakeholders from start to finish, ensuring true co-creation. As explained by Breakthrough ACTION, "it harnesses the Breakthrough ACTION consortium partner disciplines (i.e., design, behavioral science, community engagement, market research, and communication) into a new hybrid process that has its roots in the P Process, the human-centered design and behavioral economics design processes, and the Community Action Cycle. The three phases - Define, Design & Test, and Apply - offer project managers a process to more deeply explore and understand context, formulate insights that uncover new truths, build new designs with community members, and test and iterate on locally made designs. Real-time monitoring is the key to ensuring designs are implemented at scale with intended results. Borrowing heavily from human-centered design principles, the SBC Flow Chart requires users to adopt a beginner's mind to identify new insights to solve sticky public health problems." (See Related Summaries, below.)



The purpose of the playbook is to focus on the basics of insights: identifying the insights, articulating them, applying them in a design process, and sharing them to enhance the work of others in the same domain or field of work. The playbook can complement existing resources about using formative research and project design.



Insights can be about teams, approaches, processes, and more. One case study that is used throughout the playbook to illustrate how insights can be created and put into practice is the Nourishing Connections activity developed by Breakthrough ACTION and the USAID Advancing Nutrition projects and tested in Nigeria (see Related Summaries, below). The case study looks at how the insights were derived, leading to SBC for nutrition solutions that unleash the potential of community health workers (CHWs) to help improve caregivers' nutritional behaviours.



The playbook has three chapters that each provide an overview with guidance, practice exercises, case studies, and resources (such as templates and further reading).  

• Chapter 1: Identify and Articulate Insights - The chapter looks at what an insight is and how to build one.
• Chapter 2: Convert an Insight into an Opportunity - This chapter looks at how to apply insights to a project to create clear and actionable opportunities.
• Chapter 3: Share and Apply Insights - This chapter looks at identifying the point when an insight is worth sharing beyond the immediate team to others in the field. It also looks at how insights can be shared.