• “Some problems in the world are not bullet-izable.”
• This is why there is “last slide” in PowerPoint presentations.
• Marshall McLuhan said, “The medium is the message”.
• Any questions?
That’s the key point here. Whether PowerPoint is an effecient tool or not isn’t relevant - it’s simply not something field-level commanders should be wasting their time on. If they need to convey information they should scratch some numbers out on a whiteboard, and then get back to leading their troops. If you really need to prepare a presentation… well, why else is there a company clerk?
PP makes it so easy to communicate badly. Read the “Making of the Gettysburg Powerpoint” page, one of the link from the URL I posted. He wanted to make a bad example and was afraid he’d have to do a lot of work to make the presentation bad, but the PP defaults were all horrible.
Feynman’s discussion of his time on the Rogers Commission includes a description of how NASA perfected the art of using bullet points to hide information that might interfere with “Go” decisions. Bad choice
Tufte has some things to say on this topic.
And it can be fucked up both directions, with management who thinks a few words on a Powerpoint slide is justification for anything, and those that get into analysis paralysis with ROI documents, strategic whitepapers, state of the industry papers, etc…
Its easy to communicate poorly in any medium, but us old fogies are going to have to get used to distilled information. We now send out our IT outages via Twitter.
The problem with Powerpoint is that it lends itself to presenting ideas or conclusions in a manner that are much more compelling than the underlying data would justify. You put something together in a Powerpoint deck, people assume a lot of thought and analysis went into it.
The idea of Powerpoint is to take all those ROI analysis and whatnot and distill them down into a few key ideas so management can make decisions or convey ideas. In practice, it often results in the creation of contentless bulletpoints designed to be understood by an idiot.
I see milthink at work here. A tool designed to enhance ideas and concepts doesn’t work well in a command/control environment, where its use is mandated and ideas and their presentation are regulated. So they blame the tool, because they can’t blame the environment.
One other thing. Officers like the guy in the Times article aren’t using company clerks to make .ppts because the officer’s responsibility is not to create briefings, summaries, etc. - it’s to make .ppts that brief and summarize. The use is mandated. They couldn’t innovate if they had to.
Of course. But that’s what rarely happens in a dysfunctional organization. Either there is nothing behind the Powerpoints in terms of analysis, or the Powerpoint never gets distilled (or gets distilled far too late for a company to be agile) because there is always more analysis to be done.
And people in the military do not have the right to call it (or any part of it) a dysfunctional organization. Problems almost always are laid to poor discipline, poor morale, poor supply, poor planning…you don’t dare come close to the chain of command.
I don’t wish to seem entirely antimilitary here. I do, however, have reservations if real leadership is respected only on the battle lines. Who’s going to do the critical thinking?
It seems to me that Powerpoint is very indicative of the way we have waged war since Vietnam. It seems like they try to turn war into a management exercise with graphs measuring “casualty rates per month” or “number of enemy contacts this week” or whatever metrics they use to declare “victory”. Back in the old days, you just land 10,000 troops on an island and you knew you won because it was full of dead Japs and there was an American flag waving at the top.