Caption: The US Army Slide on Afghanistan Strategy, or Dr. Strangelove Does PowerPoint?
Suddenly, I was feeling a bit better about all my obtuse decks over the years.
Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, the leader of American and NATO forces in Afghanistan, reportedly said upon first seeing the slide, “When we understand that slide, we’ll have won the war,” and the room erupted in laughter.
PowerPoint. Can’t live with it; can’t kill it.
One of the more effective tools for presenting information is now in danger of overwhelming us. Indeed, I am seeing signs of the PPT-backlash everywhere—meetings that are marketed as “no slide presentations allowed” and such.
The U.S. Army response to the proliferation of this weapon of mass somnambulation is to start banning the use of the software in briefings. To cite further the Times article, “PowerPoint makes us stupid,” Gen. James N. Mattis of the Marine Corps, the Joint Forces commander, said this month at a military conference in North Carolina. (He spoke without PowerPoint.) Brig. Gen. H. R. McMaster, who banned PowerPoint presentations when he led the successful effort to secure the northern Iraqi city of Tal Afar in 2005, followed up at the same conference by likening PowerPoint to an internal threat. “It’s dangerous because it can create the illusion of understanding and the illusion of control,” General McMaster said in a telephone interview afterward. “Some problems in the world are not bullet-izable.”
A major report in an armed forces journal entitled “Fixing Intel” (I assume it’s not a chip manufacturer the writer wanted to fix) observed, “...the format of intelligence products matters... commanders who think PowerPoint storyboards and color-coded spreadsheets are adequate for describing the Afgan conflict and its complexities have some soul searching to do. Sufficient knowledge will not come from slides with little more text than a comic strip... There are no shortcuts. Microsoft Word, rather than PowerPoint, should be the tool of choice for intelligence professionals in a counterinsurgency..." (Citation: P. 23-24 "Fixing Intel: A Blueprint for Making Intelligence Relelvant in Afganistan" Major General Michael T. Flynn, USA; Capitan Matt Pottinger, USMC; Paul D. Batchelor, DIA Published by the Center for a New American Security January 2010).
I wonder if the tool has become the master, and if we are all in danger of death by bullet points. Will we need a permit in some future epoch to keep our slide deck from further abuse of our colleagues and customers?
One of the more thoughtful examinations of the hazards of an over-reliance on PPT was written by Edwin Tufte, whose short essay The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint advances a similar notion that the very format of a presentation software package “dumbs down” the discourse, and “usually weakens verbal and spatial reasoning, and almost always corrupt statistical analysis.” Called “the Leonardo da Vinci of Data” by the NY times, Tufte’s assertion is that the engineers at Morton Thiokol, managing the engines of the Challenger space shuttle as a subcontractor for Boeing, were too constrained by the PowerPoint format to adequately communicate the risk to a rocket engine launched in cold weather. The results, as we sadly know, were catastrophic.
Caption: Edwin Tufte’s The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint imagines what Stalin would do with presentation software.
Are we being gunned down, corporate Bonny and Clyde style, in a fusillade of presentation bullets? Maybe so, but I prefer to keep hope alive (and I have a few more presentations to make). Key to any interesting information is the ability to tell a story (heck, Plato knew this, and he didn’t even have a projector—but do you think he did shadow puppets in that cave?). I think what we are losing in all these slide decks is our ability to create a compelling narrative. In the rush to create 6 bullets of 6-10 words each, find some catchy clip art, and anything we can use to keep people awake, what we have here is a failure to communicate.
Let me recommend a few resources that just might help your next presentation. Clear and to the Point: 8 Psychological Principles for Compelling PowerPoint Presentations by Harvard brain scientist Stephen M. Kosslyn, contains good research supporting Tufte’s assertion and how to overcome the weaknesses in poor presentations. Presentation Zen: Simple Ideas on Presentation Design and Delivery by Garr Reynolds is more of a checklist approach to improving your ideas, but his book and his website are well worth your time and money. Finally, a good place to start is an excellent book published by Microsoft Press (who says that software manufacturers don’t have a conscience?), entitled Beyond Bullet Points: Using Microsoft Office PowerPoint 2007 to Create Presentations That Inform by Cliff Atkinson. The author uses classical understanding of effective storytelling to guide the reader into linking narrative into the slide deck.
Narrative—the key to a better slide deck.
Narrative is why we all preferred the first three Star Wars movies to the prequels—there was a compelling story that did not get lost in all the digital pyrotechnics.
Hope this makes you a better presenter for your next big pitch.
