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.