Hello everyone. After four exciting months getting my new business established it is time to rejoin the blogoshpere. Come join me in discussions at my new blog http://vizulocity.wordpress.com/! Also, come like me on Facebook (the Pied Piper of Presentations).
DK
We just got back on Monday from Fort and a major review cycle with the US Army Combined Arms Center. For the last week, we have been editing the various pieces of the Military Presentation Method, wrapping up the Microsoft Fiscal year, and taking care of some administrivia so please excuse the tardiness in this post.
Over the next two weeks, we will be doing more editing of the Military Presentation Method deliverables so please be patients if there are gaps in posts. I hope that we’ll be able to do a bunch as we get ready to drop the final version of the Military Presentation Method proof of concept to the US Army.
Now a few weeks ago I promised to give an end-to-end overview of the Modern Presentation Method Posts so our new readers could bring themselves up to speed. Here you go.
Go here for a Quick Introduction to the Modern Presentation Method.
Go here for each of the major steps in the Method:
Visualize
Storyboard
Build
Refine
Here are some great best practices.
For Graphics Library Examples, templates, and other how to’s please peruse the blog, they are all over the place. Here are some examples:
I know that’s a lot, but if you are a newcomer, this is the way to read through all of the content.
As always, feel free to post questions.
DK
Good Morning Modern Presenters,
Yesterday I wrote that I would fill you in on the Microsoft/Us Army project so here goes.
The project that we are doing with the US Army is a practical application of the Modern Presentation Method. What we have done is streamlined and adapted MPM for use in the specific briefing environment that the US Army uses. The result is called the Military Presentation Method and it is designed to be a proof of concept that will hopefully result in a deployed set of tools that officers and NCOs can use.
As we dug into the problem of how do we take MPM and apply it to a real world situation, we focused on putting together four deliverables:
So why should you care? First, if you work for any large enterprise organization I would argue that you should implement at the very least an organizational graphics library. This little gem alone will probably save thousands of hours a year for the US Army as officer’s will no longer waste five or ten minutes every time they need to find a specific unit logo. For the average enterprise organization, simply co-locating all of the company’s logos and other critical graphics will yield the same timesavings.
Second, every organization has a culture with common rhythms of communication. This can be documented in your own variation of a Commander’s Communication Package. At Microsoft, we have the ubiquitous All Hands meeting where teams get together, share good news, recognize high performance, set and share our goals, and generally come together as a team. I use a pre-configured set of PowerPoint templates to help automate the building of a good deck as an example.
Last, we all need a lightweight, easy to use method. A quick and dirty “how to” is simply the best way to level-set the average presenter in your organization.
If you are in the US Military today, we are working through the federal team at Microsoft to share as much of what we are doing as possible. The Army project’s “proof of concept” will not be done until after 7/15 so you’ll probably need to wait until then to get an early draft of what is releasable. In addition, you will note that I am regularly blogging many of the templates and graphics directly to the blog. Download them, use them, and let me know what you think.
Thanks for tuning in! As always, feel free to leave comments or just email me directly.
DK
mailto:dkarle@microsoft.com
Good morning Modern Presenters,
With the recent Wired article I have been getting a ton of questions about what the Modern Presentation Method is and how people can learn more about it, so I thought I’d pen a quick post to bring everyone up to speed.
The Modern Presentation Method or MPM is a simple, lightweight, A to Z methodology that presenters can use to create a powerful presentation and then deliver it well. It is derived from a methodology that I have used in over 1000 presentations as a Microsoft speechwriter over the last few years. It is comprised of five steps (Visualization, Storyboarding, Build, Refine, and Execute).
MPM is really targeted at those presenters who work in fast-paced environments and want an easy to use process, along with some supporting tools, to remove the common presentation barriers that exist today. It is for the everyman or woman who is tired of sitting through long, boring, and unfocused presentation at work and in the classroom and who want to do something about it.
There are a few very simple barriers that cause today’s presentation to go awry. Each of these barriers is addressed by MPM. They are:
The Method Barrier – Most people simply don’t have a roadmap of what major work items need to be covered to create a great visual presentation. In fact, most people today when starting a presentation simply sit down, open up PowerPoint, and start tapping away. This is a mistake. To paraphrase John Cleese, “we don’t know where we get our best ideas from, but we do know that we don’t get them from our computers.” MPM pays homage to this simple notion and introduces to you an easy to use workflow that gets you away from the computer for the first few steps, maximizes creativity, minimizes rework, and keeps presentations short and focused.
The Text To Visual Barrier – Most people can put together a credible written story, but the instant they have to take that story into PowerPoint slides they run into all sorts of problems. Slides filled with text and bullets are the usual outcome.
Wrong answer. MPM removes this text to visual barrier with smart templates and a workflow that emphasizes your skills as a writer and minimizes your need to be a great visual design guru.
The Graphics Barrier – How many times have you tried to find a copy of your company’s logo? And then it wasn’t of very good quality or the logo was surrounded by that unsightly white border. MPM shows you how to find great graphics, how to organize your company’s graphics into easy to use graphic libraries, and what to look for when sourcing a wide variety of graphics.
The Storytelling Barrier – Look, great storytellers use tried and true storylines and if needed they can also make up their own story frameworks. For most people, this skill is just not in our tool bag. MPM considers this and helps remove the barrier by giving the average presenter a set of easy to use story lines that work for the most common types of presentations that they will have to give.
The Modern Presenter blog was a blog that was written as a stream of consciousness over about four months and there is A LOT of content out there. I will put together a comprehensive guide for you all later in the week but as you read it, keep in mind a few things.
First, MPM is very v1. When I started the blog “I didn’t know what I didn’t know”. And so my thinking has evolved as I got closer the problem and worked with presenters on how to overcome the presentation barriers.
Second, I believe good content is more important than polish.
Many of my posts were written in real-time and without the benefit of an editor. Please excuse the poor grammar and spelling mistakes and instead focus on the meaning and content in each post. I hope the content itself shines through. For those of you who believe that spelling, grammar, and polish are as important as content, I would respectfully disagree and invite you to read the first draft writing of any notable author as a comparison. In my experience, they put content above polish as well and I simply seek to emulate their process in my own writing.
Third, the MPM project is really a story of two projects.
One project is the one that resulted in MPM and is an attempt to take industry best practices and codify them into a cogent methodology that is now called the Modern Presentation Method. The second project is the one in which I have been working with the US Army to take MPM and apply it to their particular difficulties with regards to having productive meetings and presentations. The blog has a certain bipolarity as a result. I apologize for any confusion this may cause.
I’m traveling back to Fort Leavenworth on Monday, so I’ll be unavailable most of that day. On Tuesday, I’ll do a quick post about what the Military Presentation Project is and how people can take advantage of the exciting work we are doing with the US Army. Later in the week I will include the comprehensive guide.
Thanks for tuning in!
Dave Karle (DK)
modernpresenter 