Building Interactive Skills
Building Interactive Skills
It’s becoming apparent to theorists and practitioners alike
that a limiting factor in an organisation’s ability to change
lies in its capacity to develop skills. For theorists, at least,
this is a recent recognition. Until very recently, there
has been a negligible amount of academic or research
interest in the fundamental principles of skill development.
Huthwaite has a frustrating 25 year history of work in this
neglected field. In this paper, we try to codify a few of the
key principles emerging from our experiences.
First, a few words about our orientation:
We work at the micro level of change. Our special
competence lies in the methodologies for the
measurement of skilled performers and in the building
of statistical success models which can be used as
performance goals for skill change.
Most of our work has concentrated on the
development of interactive skills, which we define as
those skills requiring a response from another person
during their performance. So, conducting an interview
is an interactive skill, as is handling a customer or
running a meeting. Non-interactive skills, in contrast,
can be performed without involving any other person.
Typical examples would be writing a report or fixing a
broken machine.
We believe that the strategies required for developing
interactive skills are different and considerably more
complex, than those required for the development of
non-interactive skills. Most of the meager attention which
has been given to the theory of skilled performance has
concentrated on non-interactive skills. It’s our contention
that this body of theory, though slender, is a misleading basis
for people like you who are struggling with organisational
change issues which primarily involve the development
of interactive skills. In this paper we set out to do two
things:
Distinguish among some of the learning conditions
which differentiate skill acquisition for interactive and
non-interactive skills.
Provide some basic principles for successful
development of interactive skills.
How Interactive Skills Are Different
We’ve found that interactive and non-interactive skills are
different in terms of five key dimensions which influence
skill learning and retention. They are summarised in Figure 1.
1. Prescriptiveness
For most non-interactive skills, it’s possible to speed learning
by specifying a procedure or performance algorithm. The
majority of non-interactive skills can be broken down into
a series of steps, each consisting of three components, as
in this example:
Step Three – Release the Drum
Action: “Release the green retaining lever.”
Question: “Does the drum rotate?”
Choice: “If so, continue to next step; if not,
go to Step Seven.”
In the 1960s, work by Conrad and others in Europe
demonstrated that the use of performance algorithms based
on simple “action-question-choice” models could speed
skill acquisition significantly. In other words, specifying a
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performance procedure was a very effective learning aid
for acquiring non-interactive skills.
In general, it’s the interactive skills
which have greater impact on an
organisation’s effectiveness.
Try the same procedural approach with an interactive skill,
and you quickly encounter insuperable difficulties because
of the degrees of freedom introduced by the responses
of the other person. For example, Xerox Corporation
attempted to use this approach for part of a sales
interaction, so that a particular selling skill (responding
to a specific competitor) could be taught through an
interactive video. In the equivalent of two minutes of real-
time conversation, more than 4,000 possible customer
responses and counter-responses were generated, and
the project collapsed under its own weight. Similar tales
abound. Interactive skills cannot be prescriptively reduced
to procedures. Yet, because people have seen the dramatic
success of procedural approaches for non-interactive skills,
they continue to attempt it.
This raises an uncomfortable question for people like you
who are concerned with developing institutional skills.
In general, it’s the interactive skills which have greater
impact on an organisation’s effectiveness. How can you
develop them if they can’t be expressed as a procedure? A
partial answer is to take a more heuristic approach and use
models rather than procedures. Since the work of Sorcher
and Goldstein in the mid1970s, there’s been an increasing
body of knowledge about how to use models of effective
performance – usually videotaped examples of an effective
performer – as a training tool for developing interactive
skills. Most of this work is still unsophisticated and will strike
the critical reader as naive and even doctrinaire. However,
because it recognises an intrinsic difference between
interactive and non-interactive skill, behaviour modelling
offers one of the most promising of the generally available
skill building technologies.
2. Learning Pace
A non-interactive skill can often be performed at a pace
which is controlled by the learner. For example, if you’re
learning to type, you can begin with slow finger movements
and speed up as you become more proficient. In contrast,
interactive skills are normally carried out in real time so that
the learner doesn’t have the option of slowing them.

Figure 1: What’s different about interactive skills?

Non-interactive Skill Interactive Skill

(Performer uses skill with no other person involved) (Another person is part of the performance)

Prescriptiveness Possible to specify “right way” standardised Other party can’t be predicted/ controlled so no
response is possible. Procedures are effective “right way”; flexibility of performance is essential.
learning aids. Model(s) are effective learning aids.

Learning Pace Performed at learner’s pace so performance can be Performed in real time so learner can’t control pace,
slowed to reduce overload. and overload commonly occurs.

Rewards/Feedback The most frequent performance feedback is
punishment for failure. But such feedback may
not damage future task performance. (Negative
feedback affects relationships with the reinforcer
more than relationship with the task.)
Negative feedback usually damages task performance
and reduces use of skill. Positive feedback is a more
efficient skill builder. The other party in interaction is
an additional feedback source which can reward or
punish.

Inhibitors Lack of clarity or lack of motivation are key Self-consciousness is key learning inhibitor.
learning inhibitors.

Skill Maintenance Generally easier to install skill, but external Generally harder to install but, once proficiency is
reinforcement usually needed to maintain it, reached, skill tends to be self-maintaining.
especially if skill is procedural.

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Why is this difference so important to skill development?
Because one of the catastrophic inhibitors of skill learning
is overload. Any performer who attempts to learn too
many things simultaneously will find that the components
interfere with each other and performance collapses. With
non-interactive skills, this phenomenon is often controllable
by manipulating the pace of the skill. A student driver, for
example, can avoid overload by driving very slowly at first
so that there are fewer events and decisions to process per
unit of time. An unskilled person may, in another example,
cope with overload while learning to use a piece of
software by stopping often and referring to the manual.
In an interactive skill, the pace is set
by the other party, and the learner is
rarely able to control it.
In an interactive skill, the pace is set by the other party, and
the learner is rarely able to control it. As a result, overload is
common. That’s why we’ve found the “one behaviour at a
time” principle to be so crucial in developing an interactive
skill. Incidentally, it’s instructive to note how some non-
interactive skills must also be performed in real time. A golf
swing, for example, is tough to learn because it can’t be
performed effectively at a slowed pace.
3. Rewards and Feedback
Learning theory has a vast and unhelpful literature about
the different effects of positive and negative reinforcement
on learning. We won’t attempt to summarise it here except
to remark that one of the greatest learning theorists, D.
O. Hebb, wrote that among the few truths about learning
theory was the unfortunate fact that it had never helped
anyone learn anything.
However, we would like to make a few observations about
positive and negative reinforcement which come from our
own experiences and which, so far as we know, are not
included anywhere in learning theory literature.
In non-interactive skills, the most frequent reinforcement
is negative – punishment for failure. The machine doesn’t
work; bad inventory control means that an item is out
of stock; payroll has been screwed up. In cases like
these, a non-interactive skill comes to the attention of
supervision more often when performance fails than when
it succeeds.
Although, in real life, negative performance feedback is
more common than positive performance feedback for
non-interactive skills, there’s no clear evidence that negative
feedback necessarily damages future task performance.
Interestingly, such feedback is more likely to damage the
relationship with the reinforcer than the relationship with
the task. For example, a bank clerk makes an error in
entering data. The supervisor bawls out the bank clerk.
There’s no evidence that the bank clerk’s future data entry
task performance will be damaged. But the clerk may well
come to resent the supervisor. Interactive skills respond
… while negative reinforcement
may not damage task performance
of non-interactive skills, it will have
a detrimental impact on interactive
skills.
differently to negative reinforcement. In the bank clerk
example, the clerk’s non-interactive task was unimpaired,
but the interactive component with the supervisor was
damaged and may well mean that the clerk will be less
willing in the future to interact with the supervisor. The
general rule seems to be that, while negative reinforcement
may not damage task performance of non-interactive skills,
it will have a detrimental impact on interactive skills.
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What does this mean for building institutional skills? At
any organisational level where there is a preponderance of
non-interactive skills, it’s very likely that the predominant
task feedback is negative – it focuses on errors and
mistakes. Because such feedback from supervision
doesn’t damage non-interactive task performance, it may
become institutionalised. If the change you desire involves
interactive skills, such as better customer handling, then
it’s probable that supervisors will reinforce those new
skills using feedback techniques which apparently worked
successfully for them in non-interactive skills. But negative
reinforcement for non-interactive skills will frequently have
two consequences. It will:
Make people less willing to perform the task in the
future. So, the checkout clerk who is criticised for poor
customer handling by her supervisor will be likely, as a
result, to speak less to customers.
Inhibit task performance in a variety of ways. For
example, it will increase self-consciousness which –
as we’ll see later – may have a damaging effect on
performance.
In general, if your goal is a change in interactive skills, it’s
useful to examine the characteristic reinforcement mode
used by supervision at the level where change is desired. If
existing reinforcement is primarily critical or negative, then
it’s useful to design rewards and feedback systems which
build a positive feedback climate.
Finally, it’s worth observing that reinforcement in most
interactive skills is made more complex because the other
person in the interaction is also a source of rewards and
punishments. Sometimes this can be used to advantage
in designing change. For example, if your goal is better
customer service in a retail store, then one key behaviour
might be greeting customers. A simple exercise such as
asking each employee to go out into the store to smile
and say “hello” to 10 customers can sometimes have a
dramatically positive effect because customers frequently
smile back.
4. Inhibitors
Different inhibitors act as barriers to the acquisition of
interactive and non-interactive skills. With non-interactive
skills, the primary inhibitors are lack of task clarity and
lack of motivation. Successful change attempts involving
non-interactive skills are usually characterised by the
establishment of:
Clear performance requirements in terms of goals,
objectives, targets, procedures, and the like.
Energetic supervisory follow-up to ensure a high task
activity level.
As a designer of change, you’ll very likely succeed in
changing non-interactive skills if you can build a change
process which removes inhibitors by ensuring task clarity
and motivation. But your process may be much less
effective when applied to interactive skills.
The primary inhibitor which
prevents learning of interactive
skills is self-consciousness.
The primary inhibitor which prevents learning of interactive
skills is self-consciousness. Effective interactive learning
requires the creation of a low threat learning environment,
which may not be necessary for non-interactive task
learning. Failure to understand this difference in inhibitors
has damaged many change attempts. For example, one
division of Xerox Corporation decided to change the
product range handled by its salespeople. The task –
and we simplify the illustration a little – involved two
components, one interactive and one non-interactive .
The interactive change was improved selling skill; the
non-interactive change was improved product knowledge.
Xerox set up a change program involving intensive training
in both components. Because initial indications showed
that the change was proceeding less smoothly than
hoped, the company decided to add evaluation tests to the
training in order to give trainers and learners an incentive
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to take the training very seriously. In our terminology, they
detected that lack of motivation might be an inhibitor; so
they set up a mechanism to increase learners’ motivation
to perform. After testing procedures were implemented,
we measured their effects. Scores for product knowledge
learning (the non-interactive task) increased significantly.
In contrast, measurement of selling skill change (the
interactive task) showed that skill learning decreased when
the evaluation testing was implemented. The explanation
was that the tests had unintentionally created an interactive
skill inhibitor by making people self-conscious about their
performance.
5. Skill Maintenance
Non-interactive skills are generally easier to develop, but
external reinforcement is usually needed to maintain them.
So, for example, it’s not normally a triumph of change
management to get people to keep their work area
tidy. However, you may need to monitor the work area
frequently to ensure that tidiness is maintained.
In any intended change, it’s
important to control competing
priorities.
In contrast, interactive skills are generally much harder
to develop. It may take months of careful coaching, for
example, to develop a reasonable level of selling skills.
However, once developed, the skills tend to be self-
maintaining. (We’ve often met people who consciously
choose not to use a particular non-interactive skill – who,
for example, won’t keep their work areas tidy unless
continually “reminded.” However, it’s hard to recall cases
where a person who has an interactive skill chooses not
to use it. How many salespeople, going into a sales call,
would ever say to themselves, “I’m deliberately going to
be unskillful”?)
An implication for initiating skill change is that the
considerably greater effort required to install interactive
skills is, at least in some degree, counterbalanced by the
lesser effort required to maintain them.
Five Principles for Developing
Interactive Skills
From our work in developing interactive skills, five principles
have proved to be particularly robust and useful in helping
us to design successful skill changes.
1. Control Competing Pressures
Interactive skills are generally regarded as “soft”;
consequently, they rarely have the priority given to
more tangible performance areas. Over and over again,
our studies of why interactive skill change failed have
revealed that the desired skill didn’t have management
understanding, attention, or priority. A typical comment
from a sales manager sums this up:
“I know I haven’t been coaching my people the way
I should. But nobody will fire me if I haven’t coached
anybody this week. However, if I don’t get these forms to
the regional office by Friday, I’ll be in big trouble. So, if you
want to know why I don’t coach my people, the answer is,
‘I don’t have to do it by Friday.’”
In any intended change, it’s important to control competing
priorities. But, in our experience, it’s particularly important
to do so when your change attempt involves interactive
skills.
2. One Behavior at a Time
Interactive skills, as we’ve said, are particularly susceptible
to overload during learning. Overload – when the amount
to be learned exceeds the learner’s processing capacity –
has a catastrophic effect on any learning. For example,
suppose you’re driving somewhere and you’re lost. You
stop to ask for directions. If the information you’re given
consists of a few turns or decisions, you can probably
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remember and execute it. However, if a helpful direction-
giver offers you too much detail or too many steps, then
the additional information causes you to become confused
and to lose everything, including the first few instructions
which – left to themselves – would have been easy to
execute. In other words, the effect of overload is to
damage the whole learning process, not just to damage
learning for the incremental information, behaviour, or
skill. Since the early Ebbinghaus studies of learning in the
late 19th century, the curve illustrated in Figure 2 has been
recognised as describing the catastrophic collapse of the
human processing system under conditions of overload.
With interactive skills, there are two additional factors which,
as we’ve seen, increase the likelihood of overload. The first
is the difficulty of slowing down interactive performance
to suit the learner’s pace. The second is the interactive
skills learning inhibitor of self-consciousness. Even a slight
overload – which might not be at a catastrophic level for a
non-interactive skill – will greatly increase a learner’s self-
consciousness in interactive tasks.
What does this mean for developing interactive skills on
an institutional level? We have found that learning is
faster, and its results more durable, if the learning task
is broken down into single behaviours which are learned
sequentially. For example, in one capital goods sales force,
several attempts by management to improve selling skills
had failed. We were able to bring significant improvement
to this change-resistant group, both in selling skills and in
sales volume, by isolating five key behaviours which were
related to success, then setting up a three-month coaching
project. During the project, sales supervisors coached their
people, spending a period of two to three weeks on each
behaviour. Our book, Making Major Sales, gives several
evaluation studies demonstrating the superior results
achievable by a “one behaviour at a time” approach.
One of the ironies of skill
development is that most people
choose the least appropriate
circumstances to try out a new skill.
It’s not the purpose of this paper to cover the whole field
of behaviour change, but it’s worth noting for future
discussion that the success of this approach depends on
knowing which behaviours are linked to performance
success. This is a difficult but crucial area, demanding some
innovative methods for objectively measuring successful
performance.
3. Quantity Before Quality
Most interactive skills development is slowed because of
undue attention to quality. Older methods of teaching
language, for example, put heavy emphasis on quality:
“That’s the wrong tense.” “This is an irregular verb.”
“The pronunciation should be different.” All these typical
teaching comments are about the quality of language
performance.
Modern language teaching treats the skill on a quantity-
first basis. The learner is encouraged to “talk, talk,
talk” – paying no attention to quality variables such as
pronunciation, grammar, or syntax. As a result, a language
can be learned to a given level of proficiency in less than
one quarter of the time needed for older quality-based
methods.
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In building interactive skills, it’s important to focus on 5. Reinforce Behaviour, Not Results
quantity. By encouraging a lot of the behaviour – and
Most change attempts don’t adequately distinguish
reducing attention to its quality – learners more quickly
between behaviour and results. The distinction is so
overcome self-consciousness. The question for designers
ingrained in Huthwaite’s work, however, that we find it
of skill change programs is how to express behaviours
almost self evident. But, because we’ve met many people
in quantifiable form and how to build reinforcement
who find the distinction unclear, let’s give a few examples.
mechanisms which develop behaviour quantity.
If the skill is driving a golf ball, the behaviour is the swing;
the result is where the ball goes. If we’re talking about
We have found that Behaviour Analysis techniques
selling, a behaviour might be “asking questions”; a result
which involve a frequency count of key behaviours are a
might be that the customer agreed to a further meeting.
particularly useful tool for developing behaviour quantity.
A result, in other words, is the outcome of the behaviour.
Until recently, such tools existed only as sophisticated
Playing the flute involves the behaviours of breathing and
research instructions. However, in a number of interactive
fingering; the result, or outcome, is music.
fields – especially in selling – we have found ways to
simplify the observation process so that it can be used as a
coaching and feedback tool by supervisors.

4. Practice in Safe Situations

One of the ironies of skill development is that most people
choose the least appropriate circumstances to try out a
new skill. Negotiators will frequently wait until a crucial
negotiation before deciding to try a different skill or a
new behaviour. The reason is simple: It’s only the crucial
negotiation which creates enough anxiety to make people
question their existing skills. However, there are several
reasons why a crucial interaction is a poor place to practice
new skills. One reason is the overload risk arising from
the heavy demands which a crucial interaction makes on
the performer’s attention. Another reason, as we’ll see
later, is the high probability that a new skill will result in a The distinction is important because behaviour and result
temporary fall in the proficiency of the performance. do not move through the learning cycle at an identical
pace. As Figure 3 shows, the learner generally uses a new
In designing change programs, we’ve found it useful to behaviour for some time before it brings results. During
create safe practice situations during the early stages this period, which is technically called an incorporation lag,
of skills development. For example, in training a major the learner is supposed to continue to use a new behaviour
account sales force, we made certain that the first few or skill while patiently waiting for it to bring results.
times salespeople tried any new behaviour were in very
small accounts – or were with customers in situations The figure is titled “What should happen?” It represents
where little business potential existed. Only after each skill an artificially perfect world in which learners are not in the
had been practiced several times did people try to use it least discouraged to find that the new skill isn’t bringing
with a major account customer. the results they hoped for.

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This isn’t a phenomenon unique to interactive skill.
Although it’s more common in interactive skills, it can be
found in any skill which must be performed in real time –
where the performer has no control over performance pace.
Golf would be a good example. We asked 200 people who
had taken golf lessons whether they performed better or
worse after the lesson. Out of the 200, 176 said that their
next round was worse. In an ideal world, these 176 people
would not be discouraged but would persevere with the
new skill until it brought results. In reality, more than 100
of our respondents said that, rather than continue with
the new swing or grip, they quickly went back to their old
habits because they thought the results were better.
HUTHWAITE ASIA PACIFIC AUSTRALIA T 1300 856 068 or +61 3 8606 4901 W www.huthwaite.com.au Singapore T +65 6735 8566 W www.huthwaite.com.sg
There’s a dismal message here for the design of skill
change. We carried out a study with Xerox Corporation
evaluating the carry-over of selling skills training back to
the job. We found that 87 percent of the improvement
in skill brought about by training had vanished within a
month back in the field. That’s 87 cents on the skills dollar,
and it’s an expensive proposition for clients. The reality is
much more like Figure 4, where attempts to build skills
have a transient effect because learners don’t continue
with the new behaviour for long enough to overcome the
incorporation lag.
The obvious solution is to find ways to encourage and
reinforce the behaviour until it brings results. In our
designs, we try to create conditions in which immediate
supervision is responsible for reinforcing key behaviours.
Said quickly, that sounds almost simple. In reality, it’s much
more difficult. After all, immediate managers generally
judge by results – not by behaviour. They look at where the
ball goes – not at their subordinates’ swing, stance, or grip.
It generally requires some un-training of old reinforcement
habits before managers can be focused on behaviour or
skill. And that’s a challenging design problem.
Final Words
This paper is intended as a quick summary of some of
our experiences in the field of skills development. It’s not
comprehensive or definitive. However, even this hurried
preliminary work makes it evident to us how little has
been written in this field. And it suggests to us that further
thought and effort could define a series of useful principles
to help design better skill change programs.