Productive Interactions
The Brief
Teach 65,000 professionals to have the conversations they’ve been avoiding
Difficult conversations cost Deloitte real money — in stalled projects, unresolved conflict, and client relationships that deteriorated because nobody said the hard thing early enough. The firm’s Productive Interactions workshop was effective face-to-face, but it couldn’t scale. Thousands of professionals who needed the training couldn’t access it.
The Solution
Make it feel like a live session, not a module
An interactive digital learning experience structured around the learner’s own experience of a difficult conversation, guided by animated characters with distinct personalities. Simulated polls, audio narration, and a character-driven narrative gave the experience the intimacy of a workshop — at the scale of a digital platform.
There’s a story behind the story
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The workshop worked. It just couldn’t reach enough people.
Unproductive conversations are one of the most expensive invisible costs in professional services. A feedback session that goes sideways, a client conversation that escalates unnecessarily, a team conflict that festers — the cumulative impact on performance and retention is significant.
Deloitte’s Productive Interactions methodology was a proven face-to-face programme for transforming difficult conversations. But classroom delivery meant limited reach, high per-head cost, and a waiting list that left most of the workforce without access to the skills they needed.
The brief was clear: translate the workshop’s most powerful element — its structure around the participant’s own lived experience — into a digital format that maintained the emotional weight while reaching the entire firm.
Our Approach
Build a workshop that remembers it’s talking to a person
We anchored the experience around animated characters — Maggie, an expert host, and Grace, her guest — having a conversation about a difficult interaction Grace had with a colleague after a client presentation. The learner’s own experience of a difficult conversation became the thread running through every exercise.
The characters were evolved from Deloitte’s existing avatar library but given distinct personalities and visual identity. Simulated polls and knowledge checks created the rhythm of a live session, while audio narration maintained the warmth of human delivery.
The experience covered three core concepts — the learning pathway, advocacy and inquiry, and shifting frames from unilateral to mutual learning — all grounded in a story the learner could see themselves in. The result felt less like e-learning and more like sitting in a room with someone who understood the problem.
Key Project Assets
Character-Driven Digital Workshop
An interactive learning experience guided by animated characters with distinct identities — recreating the warmth and structure of a live facilitated session in a scalable digital format.
Personal Reflection Engine
A built-in mechanism that structures the entire experience around the learner’s own difficult conversation — making theory immediately applicable to real life.
Simulated Live-Session Mechanics
Polls, knowledge checks, and audio narration that give the digital experience the pacing and intimacy of a face-to-face workshop.
Impact
The experience made Deloitte’s proven methodology accessible to the entire firm for the first time, translating a high-touch workshop into a digital format without losing the personal connection that made it effective.
Project Insights
From classroom to conversation
Most digital translations of face-to-face training strip out exactly the thing that made the original work: the human connection. We kept it by building the experience around characters you recognise and a story that mirrors your own. When a learner sees Grace struggling with the same conversation they’ve been avoiding, the theory stops being abstract.
The hardest thing to digitise isn’t content. It’s intimacy. Polls, characters, audio, and a structure anchored in lived experience — that’s how you build a workshop that works without a room.
The approach incorporated the strengths of the face-to-face course, structured around a participant’s own experience of a difficult conversation, and gave it the feel of a live session with an expert.
Paul Mallaghan, Director of Creative Strategy & Content — We Are Tilt
