PowerPoint Corrupts the Point Absolutely

Anyone who has been in business for any length of time knows only too well that the whole point of PowerPoint presentations is to show commitment to the objective without ever making concrete recommendations for which one might be held responsible at a later date should they fail.

A retired Marine colonel of my acquaintance who’s familiar with the services’ war colleges for staff officers told me a year ago that the military is teaching how to make Power Point presentations more ambiguous and military options less appealing to civilian decision-makers.

I’ve never used Power Point for any purpose whatsoever. Maybe that’s Luddism on my part, but still: the whole notion of turing textual directives, arguments, ideas, and explanations into flowcharts and graphs has always freaked me out.

Macnamara, Weinberger, and Rumsfeld are so much alike. It seems that in some sense, the US as a functioning unit has failed to learn anything at all during the last 45 years.

I blame Operations Management, as described by Mirowski.

Funny, in the many PowerPoint briefings I gave as an intelligence analyst (in a previous life) in the Pentagon and elsewhere, my single overriding goal was clarity of expression. After all, these briefings were strictly informative, not “decision tools.” Clearly, things have changed in the national security business.

This must be the upside to that “first MBA President” that we were told about in 2000.

So rich, yet not filling!

# 13: lines deep in a hierarchy of bullet points sounds like it has some promise for future warplanning lingo. Hold that thought, there may a presentation in it!

I see the brass are seduced by stars and big arrows just as much as any office neophyte.

I also see why it would be some feat for a SoD to issue clear orders on the basis of such presentations. I think it’s time to blame the messenger!

Doesn’t that particular slide diagram the function of a meat grinder? Looks like sausage meat over on the right.

Re Kristol’s “there has been virtually no diplomatic effort…”: could he miss the point any more completely?

and finally, to Ricks: is he saying that there’s a philosophy and a logic to militay thinking that has somehow escaped Rumsfeld et al for lo, so many years? Who’d a thunk it?

Reprinting that nonsensical arrow-laden chart doesn’t indict Powerpoint. That chart looks more like something copied from a 35-year-old reference work, drawn by somebody who didn’t understand the subject matter very well.

Powerpoint can be useful as long as there are very few words per slide, and those words are organized in sentences instead of in random order.

etat: Well, Rumsfeld’s famous known-knowns known-unknowns unknown-knowns speech has to come from some military treatise, except I don’t know which.

Cryptic Ned: useful … for what? What are the purposes that PP slides can usefully serve? It seems that’s the crux of the problem.

I had heard at some point that the Navy had banned PowerPoint. All I could find on the subject now was this and this, and its ban at Sun:

“We had 12.9 gigabytes of (Microsoft) PowerPoint slides on our network. And I thought, ‘What a huge waste of corporate productivity.’ So we banned it. And we’ve had three unbelievable record-breaking fiscal quarters since we banned PowerPoint. Now, I would argue that every company in the world, if they would just ban PowerPoint, would see their earnings skyrocket. Employees would stand around going, ‘What do I do? Guess I’ve got to go to work.'”
– Scott McNealy
Sun Microsystems, quoted in the San Jose Mercury News, January 27, 1997

“Ban PowerPoint”? “Don’t use PowerPoint”? Yeah, that will solve everything. Once we switch back to overhead transparencies its all good. I mean it would be impossible to make that slide above on an overhead.

Re: Benjamin #9, Ralph #12,

You’re right. PowerPoint itself is no more an evil tool than the Internet or explosives are evil tools. Like many helpful tools, it gives bullshit artists the means to obfuscate (right on, Cheryl #12!), and that could be what’s happening here. Or it could be that the author of this infamous slide meant it in good faith, and just doesn’t understand how to present information clearly.

The plan itself (on the slide) wouldn’t be so bad if there were any methods to say how this is going to happen, or any accountability to judge whether it’s actually happened.

It seems that Bush/Rummy’s legacy is the total Dilbertization of the military, into some sort of dysfunctional private firm where the engineers run around trying to keep the bosses from messing up their work. Maybe the military’s always been thus, but it certainly seems to have reached its pinnacle with these oaves in charge.

Jeebus. If I was Microsoft I think I’d sue Rumsfeld for making my product look bad.

And I say that as no great fan of MS or Powerpoint, though I use both pretty much all the time.

On the other hand, this does highlight one of the major problems with Powerpoint – it makes just about everything look too easy.

It’s too bad they didn’t use Keynote, like Al Gore does.

Another post in which the author has no idea what he’s talking about.

Power Point is used because there is no alternative. OPORDs (Operations Orders) and FRAGOs (Fragmentation Orders) are still written, and still used as a means of communication in the military. It was used in Bosnia three years ago. It is used in National Guard training events every month. It was used in New Orleans a year ago. If you work for a private contractor that runs wargames for the military, you will use it to learn the fake battle that you will be wargaming. What they aren’t used for is to brief or educate leadership.

It would be impossible to do so. At the division level (a division is approximately 15,000 soldiers), an operations order is several hundred pages long. There are chapters on how/where to set up radio towers; what roads to use for resupply; how often resupply will occur; the total tonnage of resupply possible; information on the civil structure of the area in which one is operating (civil affairs); estimates on the enemy situation; a chapter on weather; a chapter on terrain; and so on and so on; as well as the traditional ‘plan’ (or scheme of maneuver to attack the bad guys). The different chapters are written by majors and lieutenant colonels.

The next higher organization is the Corps, which will be longer and have even more detail. The next higher organization is either Army or Combatant Command, with more detail still (example; coordination with Navy and Air Force, or other nations). Thus, at the Tommy Franks/Rumsfeld level, an OPORDer could easily be a thousand pages long (and is certainly hundreds of pages long). How do you intend to brief a thousand page document to the Secretary of Defense (you may have three hours)? Neither of those two even read the whole thing. Why would they? Does Donald Rumsfeld need to know the location of every radio retransmission tower in Iraq? The location of every school or mosque? Tommy Franks learned about it by seeing power point slides from the majors and lieutenant colonels who wrote it. He had his own staff winnow those briefings down to create a briefing to Donald Rumsfeld. Tommy Franks doesn’t need to read the entire OPORDer any more than you need to see the blueprints of the building you work in, or to understand how to rewrite the code for Windows on the computer you use to type. That would be getting ‘lost in the weeds.’

Furthermore, briefings aren’t just created each time a new one is required. The military has a set planning process, with a set briefing structure, for each mission. The overall structure of a briefing that created in the National Guard is the same overall structure that Tommy Franks sees when he is briefed (since TF briefed Rumsfeld, a civilian, I don’t know if the same structure is followed in that briefing, but I would guess it was).

So what can Power Point do?
Present maps. In color. With movable stuff on it (i.e. a movable model of a battle). Easily transportable (a laptop or even a thumb drive). Easy and fast to make. just about everyone in the military understands it and can use it.

What else can Power Point do?
If you make a crappy power point slide (like the one above), you will have a crappy power point slide (similarly; if you write a crappy document, you will have-believe it or not- a crappy document).
Piss off all those majors and lieutenant colonels. Everybody hates power point, because there’s so much of it. Military staffs literally work full time making power point slide shows. If you want to get a quote from a major or lieutenant colonel saying that power point sucks, you will not have any difficulty finding a willing major or lieutenant colonel.

What are the alternatives?
In the past, there was:
During the Civil War, signal flags, verbal orders carried by horseriders, occassionally written orders of a page or two.
During WWI, they had telephones and some radio, as well as runners with vehicles.
During WWII, radio, maps with stickies on them, perhaps overhead projectors using grease pencils.
Today, there is Power Point.

Of all the methods above, if you ran IBM, which would you choose as your means of communication to bosses or subordinates?
Of all the methods above, if you ran a war, which would you chohse as your means of communication to bosses or subordinates?

And finally, if you had to brief someone on a 1000 page document (say, War and Peace), and the details mattered (the names of the locations in the book; understanding where those locations actually are in Russia, the names of the major characters, how large each family was, who lived or died, and when, etc), and you had an hour to do it, and it really mattered whether your audience remembered the stuff (they take a test immediately afterwards), what would be the best way to communicate that information?
A lecture, where you recite names, recite cities, recite the facts, and hope the audience just remembers it all?
A Power Point slide, with maps of Russia, with the locations highlighted, slides showing the families organized, listing their names, a chart showing their relationships to each other, an additional slide showing deaths by year perhaps?
Some other alternative (signal flags, and telephone like in WWI, perhaps)?

Many of you are educators; you know educational theory-that some people learn by seeing, some by reading themselves, some by hearing. You also know that utilizing more than one method (seeing, reading, hearing) enhances retention of information. In a Power Point slide, the audience reads, hears a briefing, and sees pictures. Name a better alternative that uses the same amount of time.

Steve

> Neither of those two even read the
> whole thing. Why would they?

Winston Churchill did. Drove his military advisors nuts. They had to spend a lot of time keeping him under control. Which was perhaps (as Alanbrooke later admitted) Churchill’s real point: the generals had to be smarter and better informed about the details than he was. How do you think Mr. Rumsfeld would fair if called in front of PM Churchill for a briefing?

> Of all the methods above, if you ran IBM,
> which would you choose as your means of
> communication to bosses or subordinates?

That would be this one: “During WWII, radio, maps with stickies on them, perhaps overhead projectors using grease pencils.” In my experience people who can carry off a presentation successfully using those presentation tools tend to actually know the underlying details, be able to give good in-depth answers, and can think on their feet. The PowerPoint wizards? Not so much.

Cranky

Steve:

Your points are well taken. As many have said, PowerPoint itself is not the problem.

But don’t you think that, when something as incoherent as this slide survives and is propagated in an organization, that it’s indicative that muddled thinking may be tolerated in that organization? In other words, what sort of boss would look at this slide and say, “Good work!” What sort of boss would look at this slide and say, “I hope your underlying detail is clearer and better thought out than this slide. Can you meet with me to explain the detail at a high level?”

I’d much rather have the second boss running things.

When I have to give a presentation, I write a summary. To some extent this summary is hierarchical, but sometimes it’s mostly linear. Before PowerPoint, I would put the summary on index cards. With PowerPoint, I put the summary on slides. Can’t see there’s much wrong with that.

But I always do the “cards” (a text file) first, and I never spend more than about a minute creating each slide. Anything more than that and I’m worried about form instead of content.

The exception is when I’d have to draw something on a whiteboard: then I draw it ahead of time and paste the result into Power Point.

I guess what I’m saying is that the way many people use PP is as an excuse to obfuscate — and it is extremely good at that.

So perhaps the next version of Power Point should have a sysdmin-configurable option to make each slide writeable for only five minutes after it’s created; if the user tries to modify it after that, it’s automatically deleted. I suspect the quality of presentations using Power Point — and the productivity of its users — would go up dramatically.

My wife and I both use PPT to teach Humanities; Critical Thinking, Ethics, Literature, Sociology. We find the ability to reach the visual learners beyond what any other accessible, yet simple, teaching medium can achieve.

@richard cownie:
I say bullsh**. The reason the message didn’t get through is because no onw had the balls to put the words “If you don’t fix this, then the shuttle WILL explode” on any powerpoints.

———————

Powerpoint is irrelevant to the matter (notice how no one ever blames Keynote, though it fills exactly the same ecological niche as powerpoint). The issue is operating and communicating in a manner which has as its primary aim iron-clad CYA. If you don’t make clear, definite statements (e.g., the direct military orders mentioned in the comments), you may (or may not) get a lot done but you’re much less likely to be nailed to the wall when something goes awry.

Lord, how many times have we all sat through a Powerpoint presentation and wished they had just printed off the slide sheets and let us go back to our desks and read them?

This little gem, though, wouldn’t have made any sense however is was viewed, so agm is right that Powerpoint is irrelevant to the issue of imparting information in a form that is immediately understandable. If a presentation doesn’t give you the information, the fault lies with the one who created it. However, I do have to agree with me2181 saying they should have used Keynote. I created a Keynote presentation for my organization, but had to translate it to Powerpoint because I didn’t have a Powerbook available. I had to show through Microsoft’s inferior setup. Unfortunately, that meant I lost a lot of the smooth transitions and impressive graphic shifts.

The reception by the crowd was fine. The group got the point and many even congratulated me on the presentation. However, the next time I was asked to show my little creation, I got hold of a Powerbook and was able to show it as I had meant it to be shown. The difference in the reaction was unreal. Everybody was leaning forward during the screening, with mouths open. No, the slickness didn’t override the message, it just enhanced it. At the end, everyone wanted to talk about the subject and feedback was at least double what I received after the Powerpoint version.

Still, bottom line is, if I had put together a confusing and disjointed presentation, not even Apple could have made it meaningful.

Mcnamara, Weinberger, Rumsfeld–so much alike. No, actually Weiberger is much better–he’s dead!

I can’t help it. Imagine a future war-crimes trial where the general’s defense is, of course, “I was only following Powerpoint”.

Seriously, I’ve used Powerpoint slides (prepared by others) to teach complex technical stuff. It’s not the slide that’s the problem. If you can’t think clearly, the choice of tool is not going to fix that.

I think that the phenomenon of Power Point gives a good illustration of Marshall McLuhan’s aphorism that “the medium is the message”. Now, anyone who has seen Annie Hall knows it is dangerous to discuss McLuhan in public, but as he is no longer living, I hope to be spared his subsequent post stating “you know nothing of my work …”

In any case, I think that just as film and text have different strengths, and tend to promote different types of storytelling, perhaps even different stories, so it is with PP and other media that one might choose.

Steve’s interesting post at 32 makes this point, perhaps without meaning to: Power Point isn’t good for details, it’s good for visuals and organizing key principles. But it isn’t favored for detailed parsing of an argument, or amassing of a large corpus of information from which one may draw informed judgements. So one ultimately gives a different presentation, and perhaps the organization makes different decisions.

With the style of discourse Power Point favors, the audience must rely, to perhaps a greater degree than in other forms, upon its trust in the presenter — since they don’t have (and aren’t given) the supporting data to check the assertions being made.

Which is perhaps the basis for the great joke:

“Power currupts, but Power Point corrupts absolutely.”

Somehow this reminds me of a cartoon that I’ve been holding onto for at least 25 years. I hope this works:

!http://i62.photobucket.com/albums/h82/Deesphotobucket/goodwork.jpg!

“Wow. I used to work for McKinsey & Co, so I’ve seen a lot of PowerPoint slides in my day, but that is one of the worst.”

No, it’s not. It’s typical in US government.

In the days before PowerPoint, were the detailed orders summarized in writing, or in crappy charts that were presented with overhead slide projectors? Is Ricks old enough to know the answer to that question?

In reference to #32’s comment:

if you ran IBM, which would you choose as your means of communication to bosses or subordinates?

Tufte dispenses with that question on the first page of The Cognitive Style of Powerpoint with a quote from former IBM chief Lewis Gerstner’s autobiography, Who Says Elephants Can’t Dance? Inside IBM’s Historic Turnaround:

At that time, the standard format of any important IBM meeting was a presentation using overhead projectors and graphics that IBMers called “foils”. Nick was on his second foil when I stepped to the table and, as politely as I could in front of his team, switched off the projector. After a long moment of awkward silence, I simply said, “Let’s just talk about your business.”

Well, everyone else is cross-copying their posts from Kevin Drum’s site, so here goes ;-)

> The subject of MS bashing is irrelevant.
> In pre-PPT days, I had people sketch similar
> things on paper and then tell me “make that
> happen.” Now they can use PPT, so I can get
> more neatly-drawn vague directions to work
> from.

Your point, and similar above, is not technically wrong, but in practice it doesn’t seem to turn out that way. There is something about Microsoft tools that seems to make the people who use them dumber; I have seen this happen again and again over the last 15 years in different environments with different toolsets. Microsoft Access is another example: in theory it should be a fine low-end graphical database tool. In practice anyone who uses it for long becomes unable to understand, much less us, good database practices. And what is worse unable to learn from others.

Never been able to pin down exactly what it is about Microsoft tools that causes this to happen, but I have seen it too often to dismiss it.

Cranky

PP version of the Gettysburg Address: http://www.norvig.com/Gettysburg/

#32,

Your alternatives to powerpoint (signal flags, telephone, etc.) are the way orders would be transmitted *during a battle*. But Ricks isn’t talking about this, he’s talking about communication among staff officers during the months when a battle was being planned. The officers are all in the same office building, not on the battlefield.

Ricks’ claim isn’t that Franks did a bad job of briefing his superiors. It’s that Franks did a bad job at instructing his subordinates. He would send powerpoint slides when something more detailed was required.

Whether or Ricks is right, I have no idea. I’ve read the first 50 pages or so of Fiasco, and it’s all like this: lots of details about poor management that are really impossible for the reader to evaluate, but not much analysis. Is the rest of the book any better?

For any of you not clicking through to Tufte, he is not only an expert on the visual display of information, his seminar on that issue is the most concentrated education I have ever received.

If he comes to your town, break open your piggy bank to go.

I often think that when the lights go down for a PP presentation the brains switch off as well. Are people too scared to tell the PP presenter it’s total bullshit ?

The best computer systems I have worked on (25 years of experience) start with the CEO saying I want a peiece of paper on my desk every morning that tells me this … and programmers keep writing , refining re writing until they get it right.

I cannot imagine military planning is any different.

If the guy at the top knows what he wants, he will make sure everybody else gets to know and act accordingly.

Powerpointless … spot on Dude.

You can make fun of Powerpoint and Rumsfelds all you want. But don’t for a second congratulate the planners of Operation Overlord (Omaha beach) for their “exquisite” planning.

Are you nuts? Compare the relative strengths of the German army and the Allied invasion force; the tonnage of materiel needing to be transported relative to the techonologies of the day; the multi-year preparation (in the middle of war, not 30 miles from German forces) and requisite counterintelligence operations; the complete lack of sophisticated satellite and airborne surveillance techniques (not to mention precision bombing and the like) and there’s absolutely no friggin’ comparison whatsoever. We had a cakewalk in the planning for Iraq as compared to Normandy, an absolute friggin’ cakewalk, and I’ll wager you anything you’d like that the Pentagon planners would agree. What obstacles we had there were largely self-imposed — not using the full capacity of our airforce (e.g. carpet-bombing), an unwillingness to accept large-scale casualties, the diplomatic debacle in Turkey and the strategic ramifications thereof, etc. — but that shouldn’t be confused whatsoever with the sheer godawful complexity and triumph of the Overlord planners. It wasn’t perfect, true; but the mere fact that it was, and was successful, is the highest honor I can think to bestow.

An important point Ricks makes in another passage is that in the process of summarization and redaction of planning documents at successively higher levels of the intelligence hierarchy, the summaries became more and more optimistic and ideologically slanted. Result: the present war in Iraq.

The details, which suggested a greater degree of pessimism and complexity, were omitted. Ricks’ example was intelligence, but the results of PP summaries in the military were probably the same.

But the problem is inherent to PP as a medium: would “[bullet point] Possible insurgency” have made a great difference if it represented suppression of detail?

Benjamin Nelson: “The problem was social and organizational” is as wankerific as one can get — it’s one of those fluffy vacuous phrases which pinpoint no particular problem and propose no particular diagnosis. It’s precisely the kind of vacuous phrase that’s encouraged by the medium known as PowerPoint. And the opposite of fluffy vacuous phrases isn’t abstrust postmodernist gobbledygook, it’s clear writing — isn’t there another thread about this?

And if the lives of millions of Iraqis isn’t “worth the headache” of looking at “jargon”, then I ask, what is worth the headache?

I once worked for a company that wrote its reports and proposals in PowerPoint. All of them. No one in the office ever used Word. We’d print off the reports in slide mode, bind them, and deliver them to clients. Everyone seemed to think that preparing 100 page text documents was a task better suited to a word processing program than presentation software. Or rather, they seemed to think that PowerPoint WAS word processing software.

That powerpoint slide is just vague enough to work!

Well not really, but Rumsfeld probably thinks so.

It seems to me that there are one or two clear empirical questions here which ought to be amenable to proper investigation:

1. Does exposure to a Powerpoint presentation on a subject impart more or less information than some other form of presentation on the same subject? (Say, an unaided lecture, or a lecture given from accompanying plain text notes)

2. Does the act of preparing a powerpoint presentation on a subject cause the preparer to learn more or less about the subject than the act of preparing an unaided lecture? Assume the identical amount of time both for preparation and presentation was allotted to both methods.

My (completely speculative) guess is that the answer to the first question will not be easily determined, and any measurements will be within the margin of error, but that the answer to the second question will be a resounding “less”.

It has been my personal experience that preparing a five-minute talk to be given unaided (or perhaps aided only by a whiteboard) causes me to think carefully about the subject of the talk much, much more than does creating a powerpoint presentation. I suspect that this – the effect of preparing a presentation on the presenter – is really where the disadvantage of powerpoint lies. Note that if I am correct, this is directly relevant to the military example in the original post.