Don't be afraid of video. You will be surprised about the power that it

can bring, the efficiencies that it will give you and the time that you'll get

back if you make it an integral part of your tools.

Good morning, good evening, good afternoon, wherever you are and wherever you're watching from. My

name is Matt Pearce, host of the Visual Lounge, and today we are going to

be talking with Christopher King. Chris or Christopher? Chris is fine. Chris.

Perfect. And we're going to be talking about something. We're going to try something new

on the show. We're gonna be talking about tell me about your job and the

problems that you have. We need a better title. It's already too long, but tell

me about your job and let's see how visuals and video

apply to what you do. So Chris, thank you for being here. Tell us a

little bit about yourself. Thanks, Matt. So I am, uh, Chris King. I've been in

the business for a long time, uh, since the late 20th century.

Um, yeah. So, um, I've done a little bit of everything, but I find myself

these days doing a lot of project management. So, um, I got

a PMP. Certification some years ago, and it was probably

the best career move I ever made because I've

never met an instructional designer that can actually meet a deadline.

I love them, those creative types. But so, so it, it, I found my

niche really is what it was. So I can speak instructional design, I can speak

design and development. But I also have that heads

up kind of here's the schedule, we gotta stick to this, communicate,

communicate, communicate. So that's really where I spend a lot of my time these days

working on some projects for, for different clients. So I'm going to ask you a

little— I want to ask a little bit about project management and, and you.

Did, did you find, even before you're a project manager, are you kind of the

analytical, really break things down? Were you, were you the party planner

that you like, yes, I have to have everything in all the boxes in the

right place, check, check, check? So party planner, yes.

Uh, OCD, no. Okay. So I am a gist kind of guy, not a

details kind of guy, which is very interesting because like as a project manager,

you you have to have the gist down,

you can always get a partner who is the details person. So I find

that my best pairings has been— or the best, the best

contracts that I've been on, or, or, or projects that I've worked on have been

where I've been paired with somebody who is detail-oriented. So

having a team to work with actually helps, as always, to fill

out the, the weak spots and knowing your weak spots. So now I, I will

say that Under pressure, I get into the details. So

when, when push comes to shove, I do get down into those details. And so

I find when we're starting up a project, the pressure is on to get everything

up and moving, to make sure we have the schedule straight, make sure we know

where we're going. So that's where I really do focus in on the details. But

as the work starts, and, and in PMP land we call it monitoring the

work, moving from starting to monitoring, now I can just kind of

relax and just let the flow go. And it's all about communication. I mean,

80% of a project manager's job is communicating. Yeah, I, I have

a, the benefit of working with this really fantastic project manager and

he, uh, yeah, I mean, without him so much gets lost and

not moved forward cuz we are the creative types. We, you know, and we, it's

not that we don't try. So let, let, let's, let's talk about communication a little

bit because I gotta imagine depending on the team, the project,

there's, there's all sorts of different communications. So tell me about your maybe 2 or

3 of your most common types of communication that you have to roll with

on a regular basis? Reports, number one. I mean,

we, especially on projects that are

bigger, they've got more contractual deliverables. And so therefore people

are wondering where we are on those deliverables all the time. So it is

weekly reports, sometimes daily reports if we're getting down

to the wire. And so reports, number one. Two,

status from the team. So it's, that's a lot of listening, not so

much talking. But you need to actually be able to hear what everybody's saying,

hear where the stress points are, find out where the blockers are, and do your

best to remove those. So it would be reporting and listening to the

team, and then being able to articulate the

vision, whether it's to the stakeholders, whether it's to the team, whether it's to your

boss, whether it's to your, you know, whoever. You need to be able to

articulate the vision of the project so that

you have a really good understanding, or you're able to

communicate that understanding of where we're headed. Because that's ultimately

the best part because no plan survives contact with reality.

Yeah. And, and so, you know, being able to pivot

and roll with the punches, that's all, that's what project

management is. So in that communication, what do you find

is the typical format? Are you meeting with your team a lot? Are you

doing email statuses? Are you— I'm assuming there's project management boards,

whether Trello, Asana, all whatever tool that is of the choice.

Yeah. Tell me a little bit more. What does that communication actually break down into?

Yeah, so, so like for instance, the big project I'm on right now, we use

a tool called ClickUp as our task management tool. And so

ClickUp allows us to, to just assign

tasks to people. So it takes some of the question about what am I working

on this week that takes it off the table and just say, hey, go to

ClickUp. And then we use a lot of

Excel and a lot of PowerPoint. I mean, it's not— there's nothing fancy about

this, you know. And I think, I think Excel is probably

the most challenging just because it can get really complex. Yeah.

So when you're, let's say you've got, you're working with a team member and you've

gotta communicate something. How does, what format does that take? Does that, is that, do

you use like, are you a lot of email, Teams, Slack? Like day

to day, where, where's your, that regular conversation happening?

The regular conversation on this team, on this particular project is Slack. Uh,

I mean, but you know, anything, any of that asynchronous kind of

chat. Um, so Slack is a lot of the conversation, which has its

own set of challenges because it's really easy to lose the thread. Oh, it's

so easy. Yes. I love, I do actually love Slack, but

it's, that is the bane of my existence that someone said something and it wasn't

in a channel where I can easily, it's in a conversation, but there was more

than one person who was in the conversation. We could have a whole diatribe about,

oh God, Slack. Yeah. So Slack, if you're listening, please buff up

your AI search tools so that it gets better at that.

So, you know, I think, I think one of the challenges we have is the

weekly reports. So, I mean, we're this, this particular project that I'm on

is a multi-million dollar project. So, and we've got a team of,

I don't know, it's probably about 25 people. So, um, keeping

all of the— keeping everything in mind is part of the

challenge at my level. And so I, for instance,

my details guy, the project manager— I'm acting as program manager, and the project manager

is really a details guy. He's down in the weeds all the time, and it's

great. And one of the ways he, uh, we, we keep in touch is

a weekly report on, you know, what are the financials, what's the progress we're

making, how many hours did spend, how many are left, those kinds of things.

And what's interesting, I think, for your perspective is

we've started doing a video of him walking through the

spreadsheet each week. And it can be anywhere from 10 minutes

to 20 minutes of him just talking about, here's what happened this week,

here's what's going on, here are our financials, here's where

we're spending more, here's where we're burning hot, here's where we're blocked. And

having that as a I can listen to it, watch it anytime,

or I can go back and dig into it, and then I know exactly

what kind of questions to ask him later. That's been a real boom to this

whole thing. So let me— I want to ask about that because it is super

interesting, and it's an approach we use often in my

organization because of the tools that we make. But what is the

requirement? Do you say everybody on that 25-person team, do

they all need to watch that video? No, that particular

video is really just for the project management office, right? So

I'm using air quotes, right? So it's the program

manager, the project manager, and then the instructional leads.

So, and there's the design lead also. So the leadership

team is learning strategist, project manager,

program manager, dev lead, and then the

boss. So in a practical sense, it sounds like this is

whether you started this from the beginning or maybe you adopted it Why did you

decide to go with video to solve that particular communication

problem? It was a matter of, of that

20-minute review of what we were talking about

was eating up 20 minutes of our 1-hour leadership

meeting each week. And that was definitely something that could have been

outsourced so that everybody could watch it before the meeting and then you

come with your questions there. So it was, it was born out of how do

we make this meeting more efficient? Rather than spending a third of

it going through the financials, right? Just, uh, as a—

just kind of everybody sit there and listen isn't really effective when that

leadership meetings are really great for decisions, right? Exactly, exactly. And getting down

to, you know, where do we need to be paying attention? And that report, the

video report, helps us understand where do we need to pay attention, what needs to

be on the agenda for the leadership meeting so that we are spending that time

and able to make more decisions. So with With that in

mind, have you adopted video in other places of your communication

with that, your, your team or within the organization to do similar

things? So, similar to making the

meetings more efficient, when we do a kickoff for one of

the sub-projects on this project, and by sub-project, I

mean, of course. So, yeah. Yeah. So, we're, we are, this project, we're building

46 e-learning modules. Not very many. Not a lot at

all.. But each one of those has a certain

lead subject matter expert. So we got to get our lead SME up and, and

some of them have never done e-learning before. And so we actually

created a video that says how to be a good SME. I love that. Right.

And so that was one of those things that was born out of, well, we've

got an hour with this lead SME. We got to get them up to speed.

Hey, let's send them a video that talks about what our expectations are and then

they can come with those questions to our meeting where we get them launched and

get them pointed in the right direction. So, I'll

just interject here that I just actually did a video on the podcast

about what I as a subject matter expert want to hear from my

instructional designer. Oh, because often we, you know, we talk about, oh, you can have

your SME record their stuff, but like, what do I need to know? So

interesting that you are actually doing that. And I, so I love that you're

providing that information in the, in the video communication, you know,

obviously great idea. It makes a lot of sense. Is there, are there challenges

that you find, like by using video, things that you're like, oh,

I wish I could do this or

that? The screenshot, I mean, being able to capture the screen, I think is

the biggest thing. And, and we are lucky that we have some of your tools

in-house already. So thank you. Yeah, absolutely. Um, but that makes it

easy. So it's, it's really interesting actually, because I don't have those loaded

on my machine. I know, I know.

So, um, so it's interesting when I want to make a video explaining something or

talking about some challenge that we're up against, I have to go to my

standard set of Windows tools, which are not as good as yours. And,

uh, you know, I've got those kind of challenges. So having the right tools

for everybody to use would make this process a lot easier. Yeah.

And well, we appreciate the, the comments, but the reality is like

having a good tool is the important part, right? Right. And so if it makes

you able to, to communicate, do you think, um, Do you

think people are down? Kind of, that's so hip of

me. Are you down with this, guys? Are you down? Are

people like, are they liking having the video communication or are there challenges on

the receiving side? Because I know I'll just be 100% blunt

here. I work at a company, we make so many videos. At

one point, especially I think kind of mid-COVID, we're

communicating asynchronously so much. I'm like, I can't watch any

more videos because that's my job now. It's just to watch videos about

things. So there's a balance there. But I'm curious, like, how people are responding to

that. Like, how did the SMEs respond to being, saying, hey,

here's a video? Yeah, they, they actually loved it because same reason that

I love being able to review the weekly report on a video, they

were able to stop it, pause it, rewind it, um,

listen to it at 2x. You know, that's what I do with our weekly report.

So that 20-minute report only takes 10 minutes for me to listen to. And it's

pretty funny to hear my project manager talk it that fast. You just had some

helium Here's a fun tip. Slow it down to like

0.5. I have a call. I do not drink, but my colleague does.

Like, when I give a video, he's like, I slow you down. You sound

really drunk. I'm going to try that when I get

back. If you want to hear your colleagues in a whole different light. Yeah. Not

efficient, but fun. Fun. Fun. I

think what you were describing is more a volume issue

and just being overwhelmed with the volume. We're definitely not there. And so

I think video still for us, for our team, for the subject matter

experts, still has a little bit of novelty to it. So it's not a routine

thing. And I think that helps. That helps make people want to listen to it

or watch it. So we've talked a lot about communication, and I

think that, like you said, that's 80, 90% of your role. Are

there other places in your job where images and videos

come into play? So, I mean, I'm here at

a conference. I'm going to be presenting tomorrow. So I have to do

video or images on my slides all the time because

nobody wants to see just words on a, on a slide. What? I know, I

know, it's weird, it's weird. Just try this, try this once, Matt. Okay, um,

I'll try it. Yeah, yeah, put some pictures on there. So, um, so yeah, I,

I'm constantly trying to find other ways to

get images, um, you know, and, and without saying

the word, the, the letters that everybody is saying here, I mean, there are some

tools out there that will let you get there, but I'm finding

that finding the right prompts for to create the thing that

I have in my mind is not easy. And so it takes a

lot of iterating to get there. And I'm starting to wonder

if, yeah, I finally get to where I want, but was that actually more efficient

than just going to the, you know, to the library of

images and, and we're browsing through the image library. So, so

for you, are there criteria in your

images that you, you gravitate towards? So for a long time, I know I was

looking for very real, kind of photos, and then I would do this whole

masking thing kind of. And now I've kind of gravitated to maybe not

so big, full cinematic pictures and smaller kind of some things.

But so is there something that you are trying to do in your style, and

does that change over time? I think my style is more icons,

and it's less, less big pictures like the cinematic pictures

that you're talking about. Um, for me, it's icons, it's arrows,

it's paths, it's helping people kind of connect the dots.

With the, with the thoughts on the slide. And so for me, it's more

about, you know, how can I get something that doesn't look like it's

Wingdings? What? Why not? The inventor of Wingdings would like to have a

word with you, Chris. He's standing offstage right now. No, I

mean, I think that makes sense, especially if you're talking process and, you know,

project management and those kind of flow. I'm, I'm guessing you're dealing with a lot

of flow in what you're talking. Yeah. Yeah. What, I mean, what I, what I

present on generally is about process improvement. It's

about performance support. It's about workflow learning. It's

about, like, the presentation I'm going to give here is about helping

L&D managers dig deeper into

the course request so that you're not just saying yes to the course

because training doesn't fix everything. I know this is going to be a shocking thing

to your audience. No, I don't think so. I think most people know it doesn't

fix everything. It doesn't. But when we say yes, when somebody comes and says, I

need a course. We're just helping people think that L&D doesn't do a

good job because we're telling them we're gonna give you a course even though we

know it's not gonna fix the problem. So for those kind of

slides, this is all process. It's all, you know, it's all, here's

the flow of the conversation that you need to have. So it's not a

lot of big pictures or, or cinematic images or waterfalls

or rainbows or whatever. What's wrong with rainbows?

Nothing. Nothing. Okay, Chris, I wanna ask you, so you, you obviously got some

great workflows, you got some great use cases for, for video and

images. If you could add into your, whether it's you or

your colleagues doing something else that used images or

videos, is there something you would want to do or want them to do to

make your guys' work more effective, more efficient, or maybe

just a little

easier? So I think the area where we're really kind

of experimenting with video right now is, uh, a practice

module that we're building for our client. That is going to be,

it's basically a chatbot practice. So there's

AI behind, you know, ask a question, the AI asks

a question, you respond to it, and then the AI gives you feedback on how

your response was. For that, we have video. We have

video of someone, like you knock on the door, the door opens, somebody's there,

they say the script. And right now it's AI-generated video. What would be

really interesting to me is if we

could procedurally produce that AI

video so that it is actually responding to the

response and therefore changing the emotion, changing the

facial expressions, changing those kinds of things. So having the ability

to, to kind of craft that on the fly, that I think that's the

future for, for the kind of work that we're doing in this industry. So yeah,

so it's like the old days of the responsive, like you kind of choose your

own adventure, right? Like, yeah, but it would be dynamic enough to be able to

say, well, this person responded poorly. So this is how they— right. So now

the person on the door is going to get mad because you just call them

fat or whatever. Oh boy. Yeah, yeah, right. So, so these are

the kinds of things where, where video in the actual deliverable, I

think, has a real place because the— we're

visual creatures. So having that video to respond to, being able to see the

micro expressions, being able to read facial expressions, I think that's

really important for the learner. On the back

end, being able to do these video reports, I think, or even just,

hey boss, here's the problem that we have, you know, hey boss,

we're, we've, we've already burned 300 hours of our 3,000 hours and we

haven't even, we've only done 60 hours of actual work, so where are we going

to put these extra hours so that we don't burn up, right? So that

kind of explanation, here's what's going on, here's

my recommendation, and being able to just produce that and send it off to the

boss like an email will make things a lot easier

for everybody to kind of get on the right page and be able to make

those decisions. Well, I want to get kind of

towards wrapping up here, but I do want to ask, so

we've kind of talked about like what you would like to have. We talked about

what you're doing. What advice would you give to

someone maybe in a similar role? You know, they're maybe they're

hesitant, maybe their organization's a little shy or, you know, they're

like, ah, we don't know about video people, you know, cuz it's, cuz the reality

is even though you can watch it 2x speed, it's still time. There's still commitment

there. So someone's gotta make that video. That's time, right? So what,

what advice would you give to others about using images and video in the work

that type of work that you do? So from a project management perspective, Matt, I

think, I think the, it's, it's the Nike approach. You

gotta just try it once. So just do it and see what happens.

It doesn't have to be perfect. It doesn't, you can do it all in one

take and all the ums and ahs. It's okay. It's even okay if you

lose the bubble in the middle of explaining people to that. Makes it kind of

human. It makes it a little easier to, to watch, and it certainly

grabs attention if people's attention are wandering, if you, if you lose the bubble in

it. So I would just say try it. If you, if you are a

little hesitant about it, just put it out there and see what happens. And

I think you'll be surprised about how, how people respond to it. You

know, we're going through a system migration going from one tool

to another tool. And our, uh, I guess he's technically a program manager as

well, but he just made a video talking about some changes that were going to

be happening. And it was so helpful because we weren't going to have a

team meeting, all, you know, all 30 of us to talk about that one

thing. Yet he could get that information to us. We could see what it was

going to look like and how these two things are going to be different, but

yet the same. So I agree with you that you got to try it and

it makes a big difference. But with that said, we're going to have a little

fun here. We're going to go into what I call our speed round questions. All

right, here we go. So we're going to— I got 12 questions. Normally I have

a 12-sided die that I roll, but I didn't bring it with me because I've

tried to stop being that kind of nerd. I have in the past,

but— Where's Rachel Arpin when we need her? She would have one for

sure. So I'm going to let you pick randomly between— let's start

with 1 question first. So between 1 and 12, pick a question.

11. Number 11. Okay, this is perfect on topic. If you had to pick

an image that represents you, what would it

be? Gosh, it would be a backpacker. A

backpacker? Yeah. Why? Carrying heavy loads all the

time, Matt. What can I say? No, I love

being outside. I've been backpacking a lot, and so it

is a happy place for me. So, favorite backpacking trail, place

to go? I've been out to Philmont, which is the Scout Ranch in

New Mexico, and spent 12 days in the backcountry there, and that

was life-changing. I imagine. I hear great things. Okay,

now, 1 to 12, but not 11.

3. Number 3. What piece of

advice do you wish you could give your younger self? So think,

picture younger Chris. What do you need to tell

him? That girl that you're really interested in?

Don't. All right, so professionally, I would say— That's fine. I

would say it's— oh gosh, I'm gonna sound like a dad here,

but pick the thing you love and do that. So it took me a while

to find L&D, and once I found it,

it was a perfect match for me, but it took me a while to get

there. So listen to what you have the energy

behind and follow that energy. Love that. Okay, one more

question. One more number. Oh, lucky 7.

Lucky number 7. Oh, what's a hobby or interest you've always wanted to pursue

but haven't had the chance to

yet? Obviously not backpacking. Blacksmithing.

Blacksmithing? Really? Yeah. What would you make if you could blacksmith something? What would you

make? Wrought iron fences that are really fancy. Oh, like the curved

and they're pouring into sand. Yeah, that would be super cool. And I don't

know that it would save you time or money, but it would be cool.

That's right. This would be just doing the thing. Well, Chris,

I super appreciate you coming on the show, talking with me and going through the

chaos that is a live event. We're so glad that people are here and at

Training Magazine allowing us to do this, all this on an awesome

podcasting stage. So if people are interested in learning more about what you do, maybe

connecting with you, obviously you got some great sessions going on. Where can they find

you? The easiest place is LinkedIn. So, uh, look, look me up,

Christopher King. I'm in Arlington, Virginia. So that's probably the— there's a

lot of Chris Kings out there. Matter of fact, I went to high school with

Chris King. It, it drove the pharmacist in town crazy cuz his

middle initial was different than mine. That was the only way he could tell us

apart. Never mind. So Christopher King is out there. That's why I use the full

Christopher King. And just look me up on LinkedIn.

Okay. And I'm sure if they want some advice on program manager for L&D, they

can connect with you and get some great, great information. Yep. Well,

one, one way we like to end the show, like every single time, is we

ask people, Chris King, we don't say that to everybody, but we say

it for you, Chris King, what is your final take?

My final take is don't be afraid of video. You will be

surprised about the power that it can bring, the efficiencies that will,

it will give you and the time that you'll get back if you make it

an integral part of your tools. Fantastic. Well, thank you,

Chris. Thank you, Matt. All right. For everybody that's listening either on the podcast or

watching the video, we've been at Training Magazine. It's a great conference and they've given

us a great space to be here on a podcasting stage. So I wanna thank

Chris King, Jeff Weaver for helping put this all together. And I just want to

say, whatever you're doing out there, you heard Chris talk about doing this thing about

just try it, right? See what video can do for you. You'll be surprised at

the many varied uses that you can find for video, including

the status update, team communication. I mean, even just showing somebody

that something's going wrong in a system or tool can be amazing. There are

so many uses for video. I want to encourage you to continue to find those,

explore those, And if you've got one that you've done or want to talk

about, let me know. I'd love to hear it. You can email me at

thevisuallounge@techsmith.com. We'd love to hear from you guys. Leave comments and questions and things in

the comments below. And with that said, we hope you take a little time to

level up every single day. Thanks, everybody.