Sooner or later it happens. You begin planning and building a large, reusable collection of interactive presentation materials (a relational presentation platform) and thoughts start floating around in your brain, such as “Gosh, how am I ever going to have resources to create all of this content? How will I find the time, money, and talent to fill out all the branches of what I want in this platform?” The answer is simple: You won’t—not this week, not next month, and probably not next year. Maybe by the time you are 95 and squeezing out your last breath, you may have come close to finally completing all the content that would be nice to have in your collection of materials.

A relational presentation platform is never really finished. There is always something that can be improved upon or augmented. That’s OK. You don’t have to have it all right now. The good news is that your platform does not need to be finished or perfect to be highly useful. A recommended strategy is to build the most crucial pieces first and make the rest of the platform look like it’s there. (Figure 1)

Most of us have encountered Web sites where some links are under construction. This technique of building an initial shell and filling in detail gradually, according to priorities, is common among media designers. The same approach is perfectly acceptable for your content branches as well.

Figure 2 is a screenshot of our Resources Switchboard, an area of the platform that contains a large amount of supplementary reference content that we may, or may not, show during any given performance. In theory, all of these categories link to other switchboards that in turn potentially link to other switchboards, and so forth. Here sits a massive, hierarchically arranged collection of everything we could ever imagine needing while presenting. Well, that is true in our wildest dreams, anyway. The reality, though, is that we are just like you. There are only 24 hours in a day.

Of the 25 links pictured above, only eight have active content. The rest point to placeholder slide shows like the one pictured (Figure 3).

We do plan to fill out the remaining categories eventually, some sooner than others. When, however, is anyone’s guess. “Yeah, but… but… what if someone in the audience asks to see the contents of one of these blank links?” That’s fine. We show them this slide and say, “You know what, we’re still working on that content,” and then go on to discuss the topic verbally. (Figure 4)

The blank content branches come to life gradually, according to determined priorities.

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