PowerPoint in the US military

[Vympel]

Poor tool

Every year, the services spend millions of dollars teaching our people how to think. We invest in everything from war colleges to noncommissioned officer schools. Our senior schools in particular expose our leaders to broad issues and historical insights in an attempt to expose the complex and interactive nature of many of the decisions they will make.

Unfortunately, as soon as they graduate, our people return to a world driven by a tool that is the antithesis of thinking: PowerPoint. Make no mistake, PowerPoint is not a neutral tool — it is actively hostile to thoughtful decision-making. It has fundamentally changed our culture by altering the expectations of who makes decisions, what decisions they make and how they make them. While this may seem to be a sweeping generalization, I think a brief examination of the impact of PowerPoint will support this statement.

The last point, how we make decisions, is the most obvious. Before PowerPoint, staffs prepared succinct two- or three-page summaries of key issues. The decision-maker would read a paper, have time to think it over and then convene a meeting with either the full staff or just the experts involved to discuss the key points of the paper. Of course, the staff involved in the discussion would also have read the paper and had time to prepare to discuss the issues. In contrast, today, a decision-maker sits through a 20-minute PowerPoint presentation followed by five minutes of discussion and then is expected to make a decision. Compounding the problem, often his staff will have received only a five-minute briefing from the action officer on the way to the presentation and thus will not be well-prepared to discuss the issues. This entire process clearly has a toxic effect on staff work and decision-making.

The art of slide-ology

Let’s start by examining the impact on staff work. Rather than the intellectually demanding work of condensing a complex issue to two pages of clear text, the staff instead works to create 20 to 60 slides. Time is wasted on which pictures to put on the slides, how to build complex illustrations and what bullets should be included. I have even heard conversations about what font to use and what colors. Most damaging is the reduction of complex issues to bullet points. Obviously, bullets are not the same as complete sentences, which require developing coherent thoughts. Instead of forcing officers to learn the art of summarizing complex issues into coherent arguments, staff work now places a premium on slide building. Slide-ology has become an art in itself, while thinking is often relegated to producing bullets.

Our personnel clearly understand the lack of clarity and depth inherent in the half-formed thoughts of the bullet format. In an apparent effort to overcome the obvious deficiency of bullets, some briefers put entire paragraphs on each briefing slide. (Of course, they still include the bullet point in front of each paragraph.) Some briefs consist of a series of slides with paragraphs on them. In short, people are attempting to provide the audience with complete, coherent thoughts while adhering to the PowerPoint format. While writing full paragraphs does force the briefer to think through his position more clearly, this effort is doomed to failure. People need time to think about, even perhaps reread, material about complex issues. Instead, they are under pressure to finish reading the slides before the boss apparently does. Compounding the problem, the briefer often reads these slides aloud while the audience is trying to read the other information on the slide. Since most people read at least twice as fast as most people can talk, he is wasting half of his listeners’ time and simultaneously reducing comprehension of the material. The alternative, letting the audience read the slide themselves, is also ineffective. Instead of reading for comprehension, everyone races through the slide to be sure they are finished before the senior person at the brief. Thus even presenting full paragraphs on each slide cannot overcome the fundamental weakness of PowerPoint as a tool for presenting complex issues.

The next major impact of slide-ology has been the pernicious growth in the amount of information portrayed on each slide. A friend with multiple tours in the Pentagon said a good rule of thumb in preparing a brief is to assume one slide per minute of briefing. Surprisingly, it seems to be true. Yet, even before the onslaught of the dreaded quad chart, I saw slides with up to 90 pieces of information. Presumably, some thought went into the bullets, charts, pictures and emblems portrayed on that slide, yet the vast majority of the information was completely wasted. The briefer never spoke about most of the information, and the slide was on screen for a little more than a minute. While this slide was an aberration, charts with 20 items of information portrayed in complex graphics are all too common. This gives the audience an average of three seconds to see and absorb each item of information. As if this weren’t sufficient to block the transfer of information, some PowerPoint Ranger invented quad charts. For those unfamiliar with a quad chart, it is simply a Power Point slide divided into four equal quadrants and then a full slide is placed in each quadrant. If the briefer clicks on any of the four slides, it can become a full-sized slide. Why this is a good idea escapes me.

PowerPoint has clearly decreased the quality of the information provided to the decision-maker, but the damage doesn’t end there. It has also changed the culture of decision-making. In my experience, pre-PowerPoint staffs prepared two to four decision papers a day because that’s as many as most bosses would accept. These would be prepared and sent home with the decision-maker and each staff member that would participate in the subsequent discussion. Because of the tempo, most decision-makers did not take on more than three or four a day simply because of the requirement to read, absorb, think about and then be prepared to discuss the issue the following day. As an added benefit for most important decisions, they “slept on it.”

PowerPoint has changed that. Key decision-makers’ days are now broken down into one-hour and even 30-minute segments that are allocated for briefs. Of particular concern, many of these briefs are decision briefs. Thus senior decision-makers are making more decisions with less preparation and less time for thought. Why we press for quick decisions when those decisions will take weeks or even months to simply work their way through the bureaucracy at the top puzzles me. One of the critical skills in decision making is making the decision cycle and method appropriate to the requirements. If a decision takes weeks or months to implement and will be in effect for years, then a more thoughtful process is clearly appropriate.

This brings me to the third major concern with PowerPoint’s impact on our decision process: Who makes the decisions? Because the PowerPoint culture allows decision-makers to schedule more briefs per day, many type-A personalities seek to do so. Most organizations don’t need more decisions made at higher levels. But to find more decisions to make, a type-A leader has to reach down to lower levels to find those decisions. The result is the wrong person is making decisions at the wrong level. Maneuver warfare and W. Edwards Deming’s methods of quality control drive decision making downward to the appropriate level. PowerPoint works against this approach.

PowerPoint’s proper use

PowerPoint is not entirely negative. It can be useful in situations it was designed to support — primarily, information briefs rather than decision briefs. For instance, it is an excellent vehicle for instructors. It provides a simple, effective way to share high-impact photos, charts, graphs, film clips and humor that illustrate a lecturer’s points. Here, the bullet can function as designed by providing a brief, simple outline of the speaker’s material that facilitates note-taking and even (one hopes) student retention. Yet even in a classroom setting, it is not appropriate for developing a deep understanding of most subjects. For that, additional reading is required. There is a reason students cannot submit a thesis in PowerPoint format.

PowerPoint also can be appropriate for operational decisions that need to be implemented immediately. In this format, it can inform and stimulate discussion on a subject that should be fairly well understood by most of the participants in an ongoing operation. In a crisis where that background knowledge may not exist, PowerPoint can be used to provide basic background information to a larger group fairly quickly. While not ideal, it is a useful tool when confronted with time pressure.

Unfortunately, by using PowerPoint inappropriately, we have created a thought process centered on bullets and complex charts. This has a number of impacts. First, it reduces clarity since a bullet is essentially an outline for a sentence and a series of bullets outline a paragraph. They fail to provide the details essential to understanding the ideas being expressed. While this helps immensely with compromise, since the readers can create their own narrative paragraphs from the bullets, it creates problems when people discover what they agreed to is not what they thought they had agreed to. Worse, it creates a belief that complex issues can, and should, be reduced to bullets. It has reached the point where some decision-makers actually refuse to read a two-page briefing paper and instead insist PowerPoint be used.

Further, it is an accepted reality that PowerPoint presentations — particularly important ones — inevitably are disseminated to a much wider audience than those attending the brief. We have created huge staffs and they are all hungry for information. This means most of the people who actually see the brief get an incomplete picture of the ideas presented. Some briefers attempt to overcome this by writing whole paragraphs in the briefing notes portion of the slide. Clearly, a paper is a better format than PowerPoint. If the concept requires whole paragraphs — and many do — then they should be put in an appropriate paper and provided ahead of time.

And while the PowerPoint culture leads to wide dissemination of briefs, it has resulted in the reliance on PowerPoint as a record of the decisions made. We used to keep written records of the decisions made at meetings and officials had to initial them and indicate whether they approved or disapproved. Further, they often made notes in the margins to clarify their position. Future historians are going to hate the PowerPoint era; it will be impossible to follow the logic chain of decisions or determine where various people stood on the issues. Of course, that’s only fair since we often don’t know ourselves.

One excuse given for using PowerPoint is that senior leaders don’t have time to be pre-briefed on all the decisions they make. If that is the case, they are involved in too many decisions. When the default position is that you are too busy to prepare properly to make a decision, it means you are making bad decisions.

PowerPoint can be highly effective if used purely to convey information — as in a classroom or general background brief. It is particularly good if strong pictures or charts accompany the discussion of the material. But it is poorly suited to be an effective decision aid. Unfortunately, the Pentagon has virtually made a cult of the PowerPoint presentation.


AFJ 2009 essay contest

AFJ is running its second annual essay contest. Submit an essay of no longer than 1,500 words on a PowerPoint presentation that most affected your career — for good or bad. The winning essayist will receive a set of books recommended by T.X. Hammes; runners up will receive book gift cards. The winning essays will be published in our November issue. Go to http://www.armedforcesjournal.com for details.

[Uraniun235]

Maybe it was here, but I remember hearing some story a few years ago about how the Navy's satellite communications were being brutally clogged by the gratuitous transfer of massive Powerpoint presentations - on the order of a few hundred megabytes each. It can be a really terrible thing in the wrong hands. I remember one university professor who basically ran the lecture by reading off of her Powerpoint slides - the exact same slides she printed out and handed out to the entire class at the beginning of class, and available for download from her website, no less. I remember one high school administrator who had created a Powerpoint presentation whose slides each had all their text sliding in from the side... one letter at a time. Strangely, part of the high school curriculum seemed to be an insistence that we know how to use Powerpoint (but not that we know how to use it properly...), but I can't recall a single lesson on how to effectively use a spreadsheet.

[Stark]

Kids these days (by which sadly I now mean 'people younger than 25') grew up with PP (and the thinking that goes with it), and can make a pretty, meaningless slideshow on any topic very quickly. What does this demonstrate? Nothing.

[Darth Wong]

I've seen plenty of editorials on "The Powerpoint Effect" in business meetings, dating back more than a decade. It's an old but growing problem: this particular piece of software creates a diversionary effect, where people spend their time making the stupid presentation instead of making sure they understand the material and can answer questions on it.

Of course, the most obvious solution is to simply ban PowerPoint from decision-making meetings, which was the solution I saw proposed in various business editorials and engineering periodicals way back in the 1990s. It's still a good idea.

[erik_t]

I certainly think powerpoints have a use as a quick reference in such situations (blocks of data and charts that can be quickly re-examined by the entire group), but the problem is the idea of a decision-making meeting as involving a presentation at all, not the tool being used.

[Lonestar]

I've seen plenty of editorials on "The Powerpoint Effect" in business meetings, dating back more than a decade. It's an old but growing problem: this particular piece of software creates a diversionary effect, where people spend their time making the stupid presentation instead of making sure they understand the material and can answer questions on it.

Of course, the most obvious solution is to simply ban PowerPoint from decision-making meetings, which was the solution I saw proposed in various business editorials and engineering periodicals way back in the 1990s. It's still a good idea.

There are a bunch of books out there(Fiasco, The Gamble, Cobra II) that note that the US Military units that deployed to Iraq that had a superior performance in providing security to Iraq were trhe ones whose CO's banned PowerPoint from pre-deployment planning. A completely un-scientific survey, I know, but interesting nontheless.

Personal story: While working at Army G-3 we had folks out in the field who would try to download PP presentations from the server at the Pentagon and fly into panics when told that their crappy satellite phone-tethered laptop would not be able to handle the 30 Meg download. It's a good thing PowerPoint didn't exist in WW2...

[phongn]

Edward Tufte shows the ... issues of PowerPoint with a very real example

Personal story: While working at Army G-3 we had folks out in the field who would try to download PP presentations from the server at the Pentagon and fly into panics when told that their crappy satellite phone-tethered laptop would not be able to handle the 30 Meg download. It's a good thing PowerPoint didn't exist in WW2...

I was sitting in on an Research Experience for Undergraduate meeting with the Deputy Director last week - and some kid built at 70MB PowerPoint presentation of five slides. People seem to love to attach print-quality images to display-only presentations.

[Darth Yoshi]

There's also the fact that PowerPoint presentations are boring as hell. When the presenter is just reading off the slides, he normally ends up just droning on, which kills attention span and makes you that much more likely to forget everything 5 minutes later.

[Logical Mike]

PowerPoint can fuck itself sideways for a number of reasons.

1) It's a bandwidth hog, and when you have 50 branch managers preparing month end PP presentations and trying to all shove them through a cat5E local network within 3 hours of each other on the first business day of the next month...hilarity ensues.

2) It defeats research by putting uneccesary images on mathmatical presentations.

"Erm, yes, we were down 2 percentage points over last year, but look at this happy person"

3) Any bozo with a 2 year degree thinks they can impress their peers with this shit. You know what, they do.

"Don, excellent presentation, I loved the bananas in pajamas reference in your Q4 pipeline, good stuff! What, you're going to be down 12%? Fuck it, lay off two engineers and get me two more PP masters! UGH

[Count Chocula]

You could probably call me a PowerPoint vet, since I've been using it since 1995. It has its uses, and I use it extensively in my training presentations and Webinars, but it is not the central focus of my presentations, as ironic as that sounds. In my opinion, PowerPoint and similar presentation packages are useful for training, presenting research results, presenting a business case, and other similar activities primarily oriented towards the transfer of information. It is NOT a substitute for a position paper, a mission brief, a justification for an engineering change order, or all you need to get a new product request approved by a steering committee. In my opinion, companies and organizations who come to hate PowerPoint do so because they're using the tool improperly. Personally, I would not (and have largely avoided) send a customer or coworker a PowerPoint presentation, because bullets on a slide are not, as noted in the main article, effective conveyors of completely articulated concepts.

When I use PowerPoint in presentations, I keep each slide to 1 minute or less worth of content, and when I expand on the slides I may have them up longer than that, but that's because they set up the concepts or information that I convey to my audience BY TALKING TO THEM! PP provides a frame of reference, but not the key content. If I do provide a PowerPoint for use by a customer, I ensure it includes the voiceover for each slide. Importantly, when I'm presenting I do NOT read the slides word-for-word. The tendency of too damn many presenters, who frankly never learned public speaking, to just turn their backs to the room and read the slides drives me nuts. That gives you, the audience, a triple whammy: you've already read the slides before the presenter is halfway through his recital of the very same words, there's either too little information without framing context or too much information to absorb before the next (oh God no!) slide is put up, and your time gets wasted.

I don't see any PowerPoint presentation as a decision making tool; those tools are Word, Excel, Access, and your own voice. I've also seen wayyy too many PP presentations that kind of, um no they actually do, forget to include such niceties as an outline, executive summary, or the fucking goal of the meeting that the PP presentation is supporting!

My guess is that the military's discontent with PowerPoint stems from junior officers feeling they must produce "impactful" and "information-dense" briefings to keep up with their peers and remain on the promotion track. Those captains and majors who simply circulate text or Word executive summaries before briefings, then use PP just to emphasise points made in a more detailed briefing package (on paper, in front of each officer's chair) would exceed their presentation-happy peers...if they could break out of the pattern to realize it.

[Logical Mike]

I have never even once made a decision to invest in a vendor's technology because of a powerpoint presentation.

Then again, I don't buy budweiser because of the commercials either.

You want me to sign off on your equipment or services? Demo me units, provide proven cases of success, give me access to your engineering group, and most importantly...LISTEN to what I'm asking, don't assume you know what I want.

Business 101 people, use it.

[Uraniun235]

1) It's a bandwidth hog, and when you have 50 branch managers preparing month end PP presentations and trying to all shove them through a cat5E local network within 3 hours of each other on the first business day of the next month...hilarity ensues.

"cat5e local network" doesn't really say much about your network at all, that could be anything from 10mb half-duplex hubs all the way up to gigabit switching with PoE.

[Logical Mike]

Well, our core is 10 gig with virtual farms etc. However that spoke still uses an archaic network that's 10/100 and the emphasis is on the 10. Infrastructure improvements aren't extended to non-performing spokes

[Stargate Nerd]

Another problem is that, using PowerPoint often is not even voluntary. At my school for instance, you better use it if you want a good grade for any presentation. It's pretty much expected.

[Axis Kast]

The author sets up a frontal assault on PowerPoint while ignoring the primary cause of bad presentations: individuals who haven't been taught to conduct analysis, marshal their thoughts, or construct coherent arguments that adhere to the rules of formal logic. If you haven't a clue about how to tell a story and why, you could give a presentation without PowerPoint. The effect will be identical.

PowerPoint's efficacy depends almost solely on the end-user. If somebody knows their subject, backwards and forwards, the outcomes discussed in the original post are highly unlikely. If individuals are choosing to use PowerPoint to replace the minutes of meetings, that's failure to do a job well, not failure-by-PowerPoint. PowerPoint demands the bullet point, yes. However, a competent user will not give in to the temptation to introduce sentence fragments that mean nothing, or stand alone.

The rationale behind a briefing is that decision makers do not have the time, interest, or, in some cases, the aptitude, to digest large quantities of material, particularly outside their field of expertise. Therefore, they want, and get, summation from a third party. This is obviously a stop-gap solution. It would always be better if the individual on the receiving end of a brief read the summarized material themselves. Unfortunately, that just isn't going to happen, and no amount of culture-shift is likely to change that approach without compromising top decision makers' agility.