Play the
CRICKET
Playbook.
Behaviour science is powerful. But it is also dense, academic, and inaccessible to the frontline workers, field partners, and community teams who need it most. In partnership with UNICEF, White Rice designed the CRICKET Playbook — a gamified, card-based toolkit that lets anyone design a behaviour change intervention, no PhD required.
Designing the Game That Teaches Behaviour Change
White Rice conceived, designed, and produced the CRICKET Playbook in partnership with UNICEF Pakistan — a first-of-its-kind gamified learning tool that demystifies social behaviour change for practitioners at every level of a programme. We designed the complete toolkit architecture, the four-step CRICKET framework, the 21 behaviour change technique cards, all prompt sheets and facilitation tools, and the training cascade that has since reached hundreds of practitioners across Pakistan’s provinces. The goal: make the science of behaviour change as intuitive and accessible as playing a card game.
Key Outcomes
The Problem the Playbook Solves
Behaviour change science is concentrated in specialist teams, academic literature, and programme design documents that frontline workers and field partners rarely see — and wouldn’t know how to apply even if they did. Meanwhile, the rich contextual knowledge that community workers carry — who influences whom, what the real barriers are, what actually matters in this village — rarely makes it into programme design. The CRICKET Playbook was designed to close this gap: bringing behaviour science to the people with context, so that interventions are designed by the people who understand the problem best.
The Name · کرکٹ · Four Letters. Four Steps.
Cricket in Urdu is written
in four letters.
The playbook has four steps.
When written in Urdu, “Cricket” — کرکٹ — has exactly four letters. Each letter became a step in the behaviour change design process. A framework named after the game Pakistanis love most, structured around an alphabet whose four parts map perfectly onto the science of behaviour change design.
The CRICKET Framework · Four Steps in Depth
From blank page to
field-tested intervention — in one session.
Step 01 · K
Audience Identification
The starting point of every behaviour change intervention: who is the person whose behaviour we want to change? Not a demographic category — a real human being, with motivations, constraints, relationships, and a context. Kaun forces the team to be specific about their target.
Prompt Sheet Guides
Who exactly is the person? What are their daily routines? Who influences their decisions? What do they care about most? What does their day look like?
Step 02 · R
Barrier Identification
Understanding why the desired behaviour is not already happening. Rukawat surfaces the real barriers — knowledge gaps, social norms, access constraints, motivation deficits, habit inertia — at the individual, household, and community level. The prompt sheets map barrier types systematically.
Prompt Sheet Guides
Is this a knowledge barrier? A motivation barrier? A social norm? An access or resource constraint? Does the person know what to do but not how? Or know how but face external constraints?
Step 03 · K
Intervention Design · 21 Cards
The heart of the toolkit — the ideation step. Participants select from the 21 behaviour change technique cards to design an intervention matched to the specific barriers identified in Rukawat. Pick a card. Discuss. Play. Combine. Prototype. The cards make the infinite landscape of behaviour science navigable by anyone.
21 Technique Cards + Channel Sheet
Which technique addresses this barrier? Which channel will reach this person? Community engagement? Frontline workers? Digital? TV? Combination? How do we deliver this intervention?
Step 04 · T
Prototype · Field Test · Iterate
The final step brings behaviour change design back to the real world. Test guides participants through a practical prototyping and field testing process — turning ideas from Karta into rapid prototypes, testing them with real community members, and using the results to refine before scaling.
Prompt Sheet Guides
What is the simplest version of this intervention we can test? Who will we test it with? What change are we looking for? How will we know if it worked? What will we change if it doesn’t?
The Technique Deck · 21 Behaviour Change Cards
The entire science of
behaviour change —
in a hand you can hold.
The 21 behaviour change technique cards are the playbook’s most distinctive and powerful feature. Each card describes a specific, evidence-based behaviour change approach — drawn from decades of behavioural science research — translated into plain language, illustrated with examples, and designed to be physically picked up, shuffled, combined, and played with. Participants are not reading about behaviour change. They are designing it, in real time, with their hands.
Card Category 1
Motivation Techniques
Cards addressing the “why” of behaviour — aspiration-building, consequence demonstration, goal-setting, values alignment, social identity activation, and peer comparison techniques that address motivational barriers.
Card Category 2
Capability Techniques
Cards addressing the “how” of behaviour — skill-building, demonstration, modelling, habit formation, implementation intentions, simplification, and resource provision techniques that address knowledge and skill barriers.
Card Category 3
Opportunity Techniques
Cards addressing the “context” of behaviour — environmental nudges, social norm activation, cue design, choice architecture, access improvement, and community accountability techniques that address structural and environmental barriers.
The Channel Prompt Sheet · From Strategy to Delivery
Once you’ve decided what to do,
decide how to reach them.
Community Engagement
Group sessions, community events, social mobilisers, public demonstrations, and peer-to-peer community channels — for norm-level change requiring collective participation
Frontline & Community-Based Staff
Health workers, social mobilisers, teachers, religious leaders, and other trusted community-embedded staff — for interventions requiring personal trust, household access, and individual behaviour support
Digital & Mobile
WhatsApp, social media, mobile content, SMS, and digital platforms — for reaching individuals between community touchpoints, providing on-demand information, and reinforcing messages from other channels
Mass Media · TV & Radio
Television, radio, and broadcast media — for awareness, norm signalling, and campaign amplification reaching beyond the programme’s direct community footprint to the broader public
How the Playbook
Works in a Room
A CRICKET Playbook session feels nothing like a behaviour change training. There are no slide decks and no lectures. Participants sit around a table with the cards, the prompt sheets, and a real challenge — a behaviour they are trying to change in a community they know. The facilitator walks them through four steps, but the tools do most of the teaching.
At Kaun, participants identify who they are designing for — often discovering in discussion that they had been designing for the wrong person, or had never been specific enough about the person they were trying to reach. At Rukawat, the barrier prompt sheet surfaces assumptions and challenges them — what teams think is a knowledge barrier often turns out to be a norm or access barrier in disguise. At Karta, the 21 cards open up a landscape of intervention options that participants would never have generated on their own. And at Test, the prototyping section teaches the discipline of learning before scaling — the single most valuable habit a development programme team can build.
The toolkit is designed to work across contexts — with high-literacy programme staff in a conference room, with frontline workers in a village meeting, and with mixed groups who have radically different educational backgrounds but share a deep knowledge of the community. The common language is the cards, the prompts, and the four steps. Everything else adapts.
A community health worker who has never heard the word ‘behavioural economics’ was designing nudge interventions by the end of her first CRICKET session. The framework didn’t simplify the science. It made the science feel like common sense.
Training Cascade · From UNICEF HQ to the Field
A self-propagating
methodology.
UNICEF Team Training
White Rice trains UNICEF’s own SBC and programme teams — building internal ownership of the CRICKET methodology and the facilitation skills to deliver it.
Master Trainer Certification
Selected participants trained to the master trainer level — equipped to independently deliver CRICKET Playbook sessions and train the next cohort of facilitators.
Provincial Cascade
Master trainers deploy independently to provincial teams — cascading the methodology across Pakistan’s provinces without requiring White Rice’s continued direct involvement.
Hundreds Trained & Growing
Hundreds of practitioners trained and still growing — a self-propagating methodology that expands every time a master trainer facilitates a new session, in a new province, with a new team.
The Impact
The CRICKET Playbook’s impact is measured not in campaigns or reach figures, but in the number of people who can now design a behaviour change intervention who couldn’t before. Every master trainer who delivers a provincial session multiplies that capacity. Every frontline worker who picks up the cards and designs an intervention for their community becomes, in that moment, a behaviour change practitioner — grounded not in theory, but in context and the right tools.
What makes the CRICKET Playbook exceptional is not what it teaches. It is what it makes possible. A community health worker designing a behaviour nudge for her village. A district officer identifying the real barrier behind low vaccination rates. A programme manager who finally understands why the messages aren’t working. That shift — from reading about behaviour change to doing it — is the toolkit’s most important outcome. And it is repeating, multiplying, and spreading across Pakistan as this is written.
For the first time, my team could explain behaviour change theory to community health workers — using a language they already loved.
The SBC Cricket model established a replicable framework for making complex development methodology accessible through culturally resonant metaphor.
Behaviour science is
only powerful if the
right people can play it.
CRICKET gave Pakistan’s frontline workers, programme teams, and field partners the ability to design behaviour change interventions themselves — grounded in the science, anchored in their community knowledge, and tested in the real world before they were scaled. That is not a training. That is a capability. And unlike a training, a capability compounds.
