Video  
Interact’s video serves multiple roles: scenes set up the need for a skill, they demonstrate skills, they show common mistakes and pitfalls, they provide opportunities to practice a skill, and they stimulate discussions and debates.

There are three features of Interact’s video that make it especially effective:
 
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3.		 Interact uses many brief scenes per session. Most sessions use eight to 10 scenes, and most scenes are less than 30 seconds long. Each scene makes a single point and drives it home in a way that participants can understand. Multiple brief scenes create greater participation and discussion than longer scenes, and participants can focus on subtle features that would be overlooked in a longer scene.

Interact uses video to highlight common pitfalls. We make the essential features of a skill clear by showing what happens when the feature is changed or left out. These “negative examples” stimulate discussions that explore the complexities of a skill. For example, one of the skills instructed as a part of participative problem solving is “asking for ideas.” The skill sounds something like this, “You’ve been working on this problem for a while, what do you think is causing it?” In training this skill a common mistake was discovered. A lot of people ask for ideas by saying, “Here’s what I think is causing the problem. What do you think?” This way of phrasing the question tends to dampen participation. Demonstrating and discussing this negative example brings a depth beyond what the positive example alone can achieve.

Interact demonstrates the skills in a wide variety of settings. First the participants see an overview that shows the skill being used in a setting similar to their own. The overview lets participants see what they’re working toward and discuss its applicability in advance. When the training moves from the overview to actual skill building, then diverse settings are used. Participants see the skill used with employees, with peers, with a person's manager, and in the context of a wide variety of problem situations.
 

This diversity stimulates discussions of how and where the skills apply. Research shows that when participants see skills modeled in only a few settings-only with accountants, only with direct reports, only with absenteeism, etc, they naturally assume that the skills only work in these few settings. By modeling the skills in diverse settings, Interact breaks the artificial barriers that could prevent someone from applying the skills to their fullest extent.