Another great email impacting leadership and the art of decision making by my friend COL (ret.) TX Hammes, who is the author of the book Sling and Stone. For further details on what PowerPoint has done when laid over the culture of control see Chuck Spinney’s blaster from nine years ago, www.d-n-i.net/fcs/comments/c353.htm
http://www.afji.com/2009/07/4061641
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.
I saw this article in the most recent issue of the Armed Forces Journal. Truly an outstanding read and great points! I have always thought that the proliferation of PowerPoint reflected a wider (and far more malignant) trend: style over substance and process over results. In short, as long as it “briefs well” we are ok. Leaders at all levels have started to become intellectually lazy, and they don’t want to spend the effort needed to really get their minds around what they are doing. You can see this in many other examples, too, such as when a higher level leader never seems to want to expend the time and energy to give needed assistance in solving a complicated problem for a subordinate unit . . . however, when things are seen as “easy” and straightforward, these higher HQ types never fail to chime-in with their “guidance” or suggestions (whether or not this was needed or requested by the subordinate unit). The rise of PowerPoint is probably just symptomatic of a larger problem.
Great comments Chad, your exactly right, PowerPoint is a sympton of lack of true professionalism. Just had the same argument about OBTE and ALM, people are already arguing that OBTE is giving a ticket to leaders not to train to Army standard, when in fact this is an excuse. OBTE, like Maneuver Warfare, is graduate level stuff. You have to be good to do it.
Laziness among those who proclaim they are professionals, when in fact they are nothing more that a “suit” is always our downfall.
See you in August, Don
As a once avid user of PowerPoint myself I have to say I agree with the message of this artciel by T.X Hammes and the comments as well. If information sharing is the goal I can see its use. But in the worlld of trying to develop decision makers the slides and bullet points tend to be saying and teaching “what to do” instead of developing thinkers and decision makers who have the capability to adapt to changing condiitons.
I see this often in law enforcment where officers in a tactical situation wants to apply what soemone told them to do instead of using their own insight, innovation and know how to the situation at hand , this inspite of their intuitive sense telling them they should be doing something else. If we truely want to develop decision makers applied knowledge is the key. As Chad said in his commnets this takes effort and persistance, Style over substance can be very costly, in our business that cost can most certainly be the difference between life and death.
Learn, unlearn and relearn…even in our methods of how we teach! Adaptability…Evolutionary adaptabiltiy! It takes strength of character to PRATICE what we PREACH!
Fred
I’m not at all familiar with PP except the occasional soporific update event . I can see what you mean about time and slideology . However , I’m yet again trying to produce a training manual for my business ( yes , read +digested yr book Don ) and have often wished I could produce as a computor game ( Call Of Duty 1V: Chaos Clinic ) But dont have the means to do myself or hire someone to do . But does PP allow it to be a homeproduced ‘ game ‘? The Quad slides – can each choice be followed through a virtual sliding door as a tree of consequences ? Can participants add ( type in )something the presenter hasnt thought of ? can the presenter instantly modify the slides , allowing the presentation to become a discussion ?
Ms. Nicholas,
From my experience, the fewer slides in a presentation, the more worthwhile it is (assuming that the briefer actually engages the audience in active discussion). If the slides are merely general “stage-setters” or basic visual tools, then PowerPoint isn’t quite as bad as what the above article makes it out to be. However, the problem is that this seldom happens. Complex concepts or information are reduced to overly simplistic slide “bullets” and the briefers rely on dazzling their audience with a bunch of visual “hocus-pocus” (animation, “cool” pictures, etc.) rather than on providing anything of real substance. Like any other tool, it is up to the user to determine how much “good” it will be.
The problem is that the proliferation of PowerPoint has also spawned the many other accompanying problems (such as the one mentioned above and the others outlined in the article). If you approach using PowerPoint with the right mentality . . . that it is not the “show” that matters, but instead it is the actual “substance” with which you engage your targeted audience . . . you can probably figure out a way to leverage PowerPoint effectively and do some good.
Great comments Chad, I also did a workshop today at the Marine Expeditionary Warfare School (EWS) at Quantico, their captains course. I have one more day tomorrow. They asked if they could send a couple of their people to the workshop in August. I told them to let COL Haskins know. Their new director went to the war college with COL Haskins. The word is spreading. They are converting their entire POI to ALM this year.
Don
I am sure that we can accommodate them at the workshop. COL Haskins, however, somehow got the wrong impression that we were having a bunch of external guys up to speak. Anyway, he now knows that these guys are really just coming to observe and learn something about how we are applying this stuff and to see your workshop.
Also, COL Haskins wants us to have an evening dinner (probably on Thursday the 6th) at a site out in Cornwall for everyone to attend. We are working on getting a private room reserved. Everyone will have to pay for their own meals, but we will be able to have some more discussion about OBT&E after we eat. At any rate, it will be a good chance to build our networks.
By the way, do you know if Morgan Darwin is coming? I am up in Newport, so I don’t have access to my work email, and I haven’t heard from him since I invited him a while back.
I am glad you guys straightened him on the speakers, those guys are volunteering to participate so they can speak on our behalf (the guys from TRADOC that are coming), and Bruce G wants to come because he believes are are finally making big strides. He is coming out of pocket, but riding up with me. I like the idea of the dinner for all of us (us paying is no big deal). I believe we are going have a great three days. I think we are finally building a network of support for OBTE and ALM.
Don
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