Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, the leader of American and NATO forces in Afghanistan, was shown a PowerPoint slide in Kabul last summer that was meant to portray the complexity of American military strategy, but looked more like a bowl of spaghetti.
“When we understand that slide, we’ll have won the war,” General McChrystal dryly remarked, one of his advisers recalled, as the room erupted in laughter.
The slide has since bounced around the Internet as an example of a military tool that has spun out of control. Like an insurgency, PowerPoint has crept into the daily lives of military commanders and reached the level of near obsession. The amount of time expended on PowerPoint, the Microsoft presentation program of computer-generated charts, graphs and bullet points, has made it a running joke in the Pentagon and in Iraq and Afghanistan.
“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.
PowerPoint is a tool, certainly, but it facilitates the organization of thoughts into specific channels that tend to presuppose certain ways of thinking about presenting ideas.
Keynote is a little better, but neither is ideal.
It may be of help to some to write out the story you’re trying to tell in longhand or as a text document way before attempting to produce a PP or K deck.
I suspect that people try to write IN PP or K as if it were the first draft medium, and that masks communication problems.
#29 Pedrito. This conversation is about effective presentations and whether powerpoint helps or hinder.
When the conversation is on mule motivation techniques, we’ll text you.
#33, Dallas,
Tweet him. He is all a twitter about his tweets.
#32 Buzz said, “PowerPoint is a tool,…” Agreed.
So is a gun, a car, and a sledgehammer. It’s all about the person using the tool.
One of my pet peeves, when the student is to busy reading the ppt slides and not listening to the instructor. My employer let me go to a train the trainer class, (I get to go to quite a bit of training as part of my job, this was by far and away the best one I have ever gone to) the instructor stated no more than six things on the slide 12 words per item at a maximum. I ended up with half the number of slides that I would have normally used. Because the slides were like the old index card idea. Put only the important stuff on the slide not the whole book. Downside of that idea (at least for my students) they have to actually take notes.
It’s not Powerpoint that is the problem. It’s the content. If you think you’re “dazzling” your audience with as much info you can squeeze on a slide then you’re an idiot. Keep it simple is the way to go.
Here’s a URL for a big version:
http://blogs.ft.com/westminster/files/2009/12/coin-security.jpg
I was so pissed when I read the article. This is what nation building looks like, people. I was under the impression that we were out of this particular field when Bush left office, but obviously I was wrong. Simply put, if we were to reduce military spending through attrition and conservation, the military would have to become more efficient to meet the task.
Hundred of thousands of people laid off work every week, yet we are so numb to it all we just smile, shrug it off, and continue our work day. And then when slides like this make their way to the public, nobody questions why the military gets a bulk of all of our hard earned dollars and the American people have to scramble around just to get health care coverage. Who is demanding that the military industrial complex be held accountable to the same standards?
Powerpoint, like most other computer software, is about logic. Some kind of logical organization or process, to getting a job done. And most wars (conflicts, police actions, etc.) aren’t very logical. More like political debates, with guns and bombs. A lot of “horse trading” with all kinds of factions. And if any one of them isn’t completely satisfied. It all starts to fall apart.
Like that episode of MASH, when Hawkeye can’t get Klinger a discharge. And all the other deals stemming from that, just to get Hawkeye a new pair of boots, falls apart. The PPT of that one, would have been fairly simple. But it still didn’t work.
Let’s face it. This war isn’t about achieving results. It’s about taxpayer appropriations. And they’re just going to milk it, until we all get fed up enough with it, to demand they call a stop to it. By then, they’ll have already set their sights on another cause and theater of battle. Some other part of the world that needs fixing up, by shooting it to death.
The general got it exactly right. Yale Professor Edward Tufte, a world class expert on graphics (Beautiful Evidence, Visual Explanations etc), explains why the general is right in a wonderful pamphlet titled “The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint(Paperback, 2006).
Tufte makes a believable case that Powerpoint brought down both space shuttles. Tufte pamphlet is $7 at Amazon and other bookstores.
Actually pedro my “shortcomings” had nothing to do with my knowledge. It have everything to do with the mentality of the group that I worked for. They had the idea that this is how its always been done so why do something different. When teaching older students (40-50+ years of age) who had been out of the education system for so long. It was felt that providing the maximum amount of material was helpful. What it did accomplish in reality was to overwhelm the students with a huge amount of information to digest. Once I could show that this was a “better way” than all the bitching stopped. Well all the bitching from management stopped. The students not so much.