Must. Be. AWESOME!!!

And now, the final video from my MountainRunner Institute talk at the “Now Media Seminar.” Let me know what you thought!

You can also find the slides from this preso by following this link.

Here’s Part 4 of my MountainRunner Institute talk from the “Now Media Seminar.” HOWF!

Also, you can follow this link to see the actual slides from the event.

Here’s the third part of my MountainRunner Institute talk from our “Now Media Seminar” on July 6th. Hope you dig!

Here’s the second part of my MountainRunner Institute talk from July 6th’s “Now Media Seminar.” Enjoy!

This past Tuesday, July 6th, 2010, I got the opportunity to speak as part of the MountainRunner Institute’s “Now Media” seminar at the National Press Club. For the less sharp-eyed out there, I’ve been proud to call Matt Armstrong (MRi President and a highly AWESOME blogger) a friend for some time… even before he provided the first forum for Must. Be. AWESOME!!! in its proto-stage. A few months ago, Matt asked me to help him transform his blog, MountainRunner, into a full-fledged nonprofit institute devoted to the study of and conversations about public diplomacy and strategic communication.

One of MRi’s key offerings is a seminar Matt honchos about “Now Media,” his concept of understanding the existing and emerging media environment as it relates to influence and engagement. These seminars give us an opportunity to wrap up everything we learn into something useful for communication practitioners. At this particular event, we had attendees from the U.S. Marine Corps public affairs team, the State Department, and even a contingent of Indonesian bloggers visiting the States on a State Department exchange.

Matt asked me to put together something to capstone the day, integrating everything from his lectures to the examples and information of our guest lecturers. I thought I would present that briefing, “Engaging in a Now Media Continuum,” here for everyone to check out. Accompanying the slideshow is the first of five videos of my actual presentation. I’ll deploy a new chapter of this video series every day for the next five days, so tune in or subscribe to the blog via RSS to get the whole story!

This was my first time presenting on behalf of MountainRunner, so I’d be really interested in everyone’s feedback: What do you think about engaging in a “now media” continuum?

(Note: Special thanks to Rob Watwood for his time and energy discussing the various ideas, thoughts, and challenges that I eventually cobbled together into this preso.)

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The Gov 2.0 Expo has been a pretty amazing experience, speaking aside. I’ve met some really great people working at hyperlocal levels of government on extremely cool, forward-thinking means of connecting with their citizens. Sometimes you have to really have to embed at these events to get a good understanding of their value, and this one delivered.

I’ll write up a more in-depth analysis of the event once I’ve had some time to think on things. But in the meantime, here’s video of my 5-minute presentation from Tuesday’s Keynote Kickoff. (Thanks to the fine people at O’Reilly Media for recording, livestreaming and promoting this!)

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Just hit SEND on the final “Instituting a Culture of AWESOME in Government” preso to be delivered at the Gov 2.0 Expo this week. I’m up at 5:55pm on Tuesday at the Washington Convention Center. If you happen to be in town and catch me, shoot me a holler on Twitter so we can connect later. There’s a social or some shit like that after the keynote Tuesday, and I’d love to hear how AWESOME my delivery was.

I’m a complete stranger to Ignite-style briefing: 20 slides, 5 minutes, 15 seconds per slide. It’s either gonna be a fun exercise in bullshittery or a complete shit-show. HOWF!

For folks who aren’t going to make it to the Expo, I’ve uploaded the preso here for your viewing pleasure. Please feel free to leave a comment below and tell me what you think. I’m going to try and get video of the actual Day-Of, so be on the lookout for that in subsequent posts.

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I’m using this post as a testing ground of sorts with which to work out the design of my 5-minute Gov 2.0 Expo talk on May 25th, 2010. As a result what you are about to read may seem random and disjointed at first. Fair warning.

I think what I’ll probably do is develop the case study as a full-on post for Must. Be. AWESOME!!! so that interested folks from the expo can come here and read through the entire narrative. What I’ll need to do then is make the 5-minute preso more of a pitch for people to come back and get the full effect. Plus, it’ll be a great place to start a conversation about the Tech Team, share experiences, continue analyzing, etc.

Original Pitch

“Instituting a Culture of AWESOME in Government: The Case of the IED Task Force Tech Team”

• Purpose 1: Demonstrate how gov entities can exude AWESOME
• Purpose 2: Extract lessons (positive & negative) from case study
• Contraints: 45-min preso time shortened to 5 minutes — warrants major curtailing in presentation of findings

Major Themes in Research/Interviews

• Righteous mission: helping to save soldiers’ lives
• Brotherhood: team exceptionally loyal to one another, inside & outside of work
• Fellowship: people & job were fun – weekly happy hours & grill-outs
• Leadership: BG Votel  and LTC Jost took risks, backed up his people every time

Lessons Learned

• The right mix of personalities will enable AWESOME in any enterprise.
• AWESOME activity creates swarm of “antibodies” (naysayers, can’t-do’s, etc).
• People will give 18hrs/day if the activity is AWESOME.
• Small, super-empowered teams can change everything if given the chance.
• Cults of personality and rabid positivity will engender loyalty between all echelons.
• Middle management worked for team members, not vice versa.
• The business of AWESOME is inherently and unavoidably social.
• Ad hoc, task force structure engendered agility, effectiveness, & ownership.
• Permanizing the organization destroyed team cohesion & introduced stagnation & irrelevance.

Unanswered Questions

• How transferrable is this case to other parts of government?
• If JIEDDO was borne of the Tech Team / JIEDDTF, then wasn’t the organization a failure? (because JIEDDO pretty much sucks today)

The IED Task Force Tech Team (circa 2004)

A note on formatting: I’m also currently fooling around with Prezi, a new web-based system of designing presentations that purports to help design better presentations by forcing you to think creatively, visually, and using mind-mapping techniques. The videos make it seem pretty cool, and I was considering using this for my Gov 2.0 preso. However, I’m concerned that the Gov 2.0 staff isn’t ready for the newness of Prezi (I’m not even sure of the file formats supported), and I’ve only got a few weeks to play around with it. Further, despite the New York Times‘ recent story on how tired of PowerPoint everyone in the Defense establishment is, everyone’s still using it and everyone’s used to seeing it.

In 5 minutes’ time, I’m not even sure the benefits of Prezi would be worth it. Still, I may do a longer version of the talk in Prezi to post here on the blog at a later date. We’ll have to see what the future demand looks like for this case study.

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A couple months ago, I told y’all about submitting a proposal to the Gov 2.0 Expo occurring in May. It is with glad jazz hands that I can tell you my proposal, “Instituting a Culture of AWESOME in Government,” was accepted by the Expo committee! I’m now listed as a speaker alongside some pretty frickin’ AWESOME company (like Gary V!).

As promised, I’m going to blog about this experience. It’s really the first time I’ve ever had the chance to analyze and put forth a case that’s totally unique (at least in my opinion), so I’m really excited about the opportunity. I am deep into collecting data for the case study, and one method I’m using to do this has been reaching out to former members of the IED Task Force Tech Team for stories, pictures, and other info that may help my analysis. It’s been a BLAST reconnecting with these guys. We had a lot of fun back in the Tech Team days, which is one cornerstone of that experience’s AWESOMEness.

I have gotten a crap-ton of fun stuff so far, a lot of which I hope makes it into the final preso. But to give you a tease, here is the first logo one of our Tech Team brethren, Shane Gilmore, cooked up back when we first went joint.

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I recently spoke at TWTRCON DC about how inserting a little AWESOME into your daily activities will reap large rewards in your life, be it personal or professional. I posit that by adhering to the tried and true K.I.S.S. Principle – “Keep It Simple, Stupid” – you’re actually defeating a creative, innovative urge that leads to all things AWESOME. Worse, by continually sticking to the K.I.S.S. Principle, you may actually do long term damage to your inherent ability to recognize and generate awesomeness on your own. This is the first chat in what I hope is a long conversation about raising everyone’s game in modern communication.

A classic case of AWESOME simplicity.

I am not by any means arguing that simplicity is a bad thing and should be shunned. Simplicity in communication is critical to the imparting of ideas and concepts to audiences small and large. However, I want you to think about this in terms of how keeping it simple can be dangerous if you’re a creative type (or want to be). For that, let me draw upon a sad example from my time working in the Pentagon.

One of the first things you get told when you go to work for any Defense Department organization – be it military or civilian service or contractor – is that you need to learn how to communicate briefly and succinctly. This is important because the Pentagon, like all military bases and commands, runs on a steady stream of documentation, policy, and other “paper” that constitutes the general “work” of the Department. General officers are often required to make several decisions a day, requiring extensive coordination with multiple offices.

So the “staff memo” has become something of a regular item seen in the hands of many poor staff officers running about the Byzantine five-walled maze. While these memos often contain the complete policy or document that requires coordination and decision, the important piece to each one is its cover sheet or executive summary. “EXSUMs” are no more than one page and summarize the content of the documents in bulletized form and clearly note what action is required of the recipient.

Because of these summaries, the main documents they summarize often never get read. So staff officers value the skill of being able to boil the component information down to a few bullets one one sheet of paper. (You all see this a lot on government PowerPoint slides, which constitute absolute abortions of the presentation medium.)

Sounds reasonable, right? Why shouldn’t we communicate so concisely between all these hundreds of thousands of government employees?

Here’s why: Ask any one of those staff officers to author a white paper on their own on any topic of interest, and you will see how massively boring their compositions are.

After a fraction of a career of having the K.I.S.S. Principle drilled into your head, it’s a mammoth task to indulge in original thinking much less creative communication. This causes a state of document fatigue where everything you produce looks similar, sounds similar, adheres to the same style, ad infinitum. The more you do it, the harder a habit it is to break.

This vicious circle destroys the creative impetus to deliver AWESOME content. Even the very word “keep” restricts one to certain, specific actions. While this may help in homogenizing a Defense Department and a government that depends on brevity to survive, I submit to you that it also prevents those same organizations from improving their methods of work and evolving to a modern, 21st century degree of communication and interaction.

Instead of keeping it simple, I invite you to make it AWESOME.

Here are a couple suggestions on doing just that:

• Next time you see a tweet from someone in your network referring to any publication longer than an article or blog post, print it out and read it away from the computer.
• For every business or nonfiction book you read, commit to reading two works of fiction. A book of short stories by your favorite author is a great way to start.
• Instead of writing a summary for someone, go talk to them in person about it. Extra points: bring a couple of photos of the subject with you for visualization.
• Do something risky with your work. Insert a LOLcat pic into that white paper you’re producing. Draw a cartoon, even if you’re not an artist. Tell a joke. Fart.

Simple and AWESOME do not have to be mutually exclusive. Some of the best examples of AWESOME are pretty short and sweet (see the “Dick in the Box” T-shirt design above). Brevity will naturally enable your content to be absorbed more quickly by more people, especially when disseminating via social media tools. As you can see from the examples above, being creative can be as easy as regurgitating someone else’s content from the Web (thanks, socialism!). The tricky part to that is enabling your creativity in such a way that its awesomeness flows out and has the same effect when it’s edited, summarized, abrogated, or otherwise cut down.

I believe that by keeping it simple, you’re making it harder to absorb and produce AWESOME content, no matter the source. I understand that this idea of mine may seem controversial or even mad in this travel-sized world that social media has enabled around us. The authors of Made to Stick, one of my favorite books on creativity, even argue that simplicity is paramount to the permanence of great ideas. I also recognize that I’ve applied some sweeping generalizations using specific examples in this post.

So tell me what YOU think. What are some examples of this that YOU’VE experienced? Where have I gone wrong? Do you have some better ideas to share?

Light up the comments section on this one, folks. I will give out a special prize to the most passionate response to this post I see.

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