Course Outcomes

This military briefing course will:

  • Help presenters isolate their message’s “bottom line.”
  • Supply tools for organizing information.
  • Give recommendations for creating well-designed slides.
  • Provide platform skills coaching.

Course Overview

Briefings are an essential and ever-present element of communication in the military. Depending on their design and delivery, briefings can educate, clarify, confuse, or bore an audience.  This course provides participants with tools and processes to make the briefing process easier.  The program is suited for anyone responsible for designing or delivering briefs to a military or government audience.

Program Objectives

At this program’s conclusion, participants should be able to:

  • Identify the four types of military briefings.
  • Describe an audience analysis and why it is a needed step in preparing for a briefing.
  • Organize information in a concise, clear, and meaningful way.
  • Use PowerPoint as a catalyst and not a crutch.
  • Prepare for the unexpected.
  • Field tough questions.

The following outline highlights some of the course’s key learning points. As part of your training program, we will modify content as needed to meet your business objectives. Upon request, we will provide you with a copy of the participant materials prior to the session(s).

Workshop Outline

Surveying the Environment: Why Am I Here?

This workshop opens with a discussion about briefings and how they differ from other types of presentations. We will identify the elements that contribute to a briefing’s success or failure and we will review different types of military briefings (information briefings, decision briefings, mission briefings, and staff briefings) and when to use each.

Identifying the Target: Who Are These People?

Is the audience basically the same or is it made up of several different groups? Is this information new to them? Is it of interest? How will they react? How much do they already know?  Those are just a few of the questions briefers need to ask themselves before creating the first slide or note card. During this part of the workshop, we will introduce an audience profiling tool.  Participants will then apply the tool to several briefing scenarios.

Plotting the Course: How Am I Going to Organize My Information?

All good briefings have a destination and a path to get there.  This part of the workshop introduces several tools to help participants identify the “bottom line,” message themes, and key points.  Participants will practice organizing content using mind mapping, topic sorting, and frames and lists.

Give Me a Map: Using PowerPoint

Depending on their use, slides can support or sabotage a brief. In this program segment, participants will learn how to determine if their briefing would benefit from slides, when to start creating slides during the briefing-design process, the basics of good slide design, and how they should interact with their slides when on stage.

Overcoming Obstacles: What Do I Need to Plan Around?

Is the room too small? If the length of time I have on the agenda is altered dramatically, do I have a backup plan?  Can I brief this topic with no slides?  Am I prepared to present my topics out of order if my audience demands I do so?  These are only some of the “what-if” questions competent briefers ask and answer during their preparation process. In this part of the program, participants will design a personal checklist as they consider typical barriers to successful briefings and solutions for each.

Drilling on Your Feet: Let’s Brief

Confident, knowledgeable, logical, and concise: these are the hallmarks of someone skilled at briefing government and military officials. In addition to practice throughout the course, this part of the program examines the skills needed to effectively deliver a briefing.  During this final segment, each participant will brief the class on a subject of his or her choosing and receive structured feedback from those in the audience.

At the conclusion of this military briefing course, participants will understand what it takes to design and deliver an effective briefing to an audience comprising military or government personnel.