PowerPointers
April 2, 2007 by cynthia
Did PowerPoint kill the astronauts? Scary thought.
Edward Tufte, “visual display of information” guru, certainly thinks so. I just finished reading his essay, The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint: Pitching Out Corrupts Within, and he all but accused the software of murder.
Tufte contends that PowerPoint presentations filter and “good news-ize” complex information to the point that it misleads. It was this, he says, that caused NASA leaders to assume that broken-off insulation caused no significant damage to the space shuttle Columbia. In fact the insulation had caused critical damage, and the Columbia burned up on re-entry, killing all seven crew members.
Tufte’s main point is that some data–especially technical data–simply doesn’t lend itself to six bullet points on a slide. In those cases, PowerPoint summations can be dangerous. Businesses that rely on PowerPoint to deliver critical information, he says, aren’t doing much more than guesstimating. Pretty nasty conclusion, especially given the fact that 95 percent of businesspeople I’ve worked with pretty much live in PowerPoint.
When I first started working for a big multinational, I was astonished at how many software tools these guys didn’t use. PointPoint was the way they wrote reports, calculated budgets, viewed charts and images, communicated decisions…basically if you couldn’t do it in Outlook, you did it in PowerPoint.
Tufte recommends tossing PowerPoint out on its digital ear and forcing employees to talk to people, write text reports, fill in spreadsheets, etc. Not a bad idea, but there’s a lot of corporate inertia to overcome in making that happen.
I’ve spent a lot of time (blush) teaching engineers how to make better PowerPoint slides with that six-lines-to-a-slide-no-clip-art stuff. Obviously my time would have been better spent teaching them how to communicate effectively without slides…but take a slideshow away from an engineer and you have one nakedly uncomfortable engineer up there on the podium. So we did the best we could.
But that’s not PowerPoint’s fault. That’s the fault of overworked employees taking the easy road. It’s the fault of managers allowing employees to get away with it, and it’s the fault of senior managers for structuring organizations so that no one has time to really understand the data flowing through the business.
Or to paraphrase the NRA: PowerPoint doesn’t kill people, PEOPLE kill….
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Ah… Tufte! Anyone in the business of making presentations, designing websites, or making brochures should read his books and articles.
The PowerPoint article reminds of when I was a young geophysicist with Mobil oil. I’d done some analysis that was a bit dubious…but maybe not. When I presented it to my boss in its raw and hand-written form it was ignored. When I took the exact same data and punched it up on some cards and ran it though the IBM computer printer so that it was nice and neat on green-bar paper it was immediately accepted as gospel because THE COMPUTER HAD PRINTED IT. Same crap data… different presentation. Go figure…
Tufte, I have to admit, is one of my heroes. I absolutely agree with his conclusion, but his solution–PowerPoint has become the corporate lingua franca, today’s equivalent of your green-bar paper, and we’re not going to get rid of it that easily.
Nor, frankly, should we. If every corporate whatever has become a communicator, then they should learn how to communicate instead of hiding behind a poor li’l ole’ software program…
I spent 5 years teaching MS Office to Nokia engineers. During that time I NEVER used a slide when teaching Powerpoint.
I had to pass some information, and drive it in. PP is not a tool for that
-lauri
I would agree, Lauri. I think an exceptional PowerPoint presentation can be an incredible teaching tool…but the number of exceptional PowerPoint presentation I’ve seen in the last ten years can probably be counted on both hands. (including my own–blush–)
It’s all about picking the right tools to deliver the information…and sometimes PPT just isn’t the right tool.