Lies, Death, and PowerPoint

The US military were reported last week to have found out something that many of us involved in information design and technical communications have known for a very long time: over-use of PowerPoint obscures the truth rather than reveals it, and confuses an audience rather than educates it. But the reports from the military suggest that the results of misuse may actually endanger lives.

On 26th April, the New York Times published an article, We Have Met the Enemy and He Is PowerPoint, in which senior military officers were quoted complaining about the over-use of presentation slide software as a substitute for serious analysis. In respect of one particular slide, that made the interaction of competing factions and interests in Afghanistan look like a “bowl of spaghetti”, General Stanley A. McChrystal is reported to have said “When we understand that slide, we’ll have won the war”.

Later in the week, Jonathan Salem Baskin, an expert on branding, wrote on his blog under the title PowerPoint makes us stupid that he had read the New York Times article “with a mixture of shock and smug satisfaction”, and I certainly shared those two emotions. But in addition to shock and “I-told-you-so” smugness, I also felt frustration, and perhaps a little guilt as well.

We all know that it’s really easy to create awful slide presentations. Everyone has been bored to tears by the speaker who reads from the screen, crowds too much text onto the slide, and adds unnecessary and meaningless diagrams just because they can. Don McMillan’s latest version of his “Death by PowerPoint” presentation is painfully funny because it is only a very slight exaggeration of what many of us have seen – and what many of us, myself included, may have done in the past.

More seriously, Edward Tufte has been spearheading an assault on the way the use of PowerPoint can corrupt our critical faculties for many years. He wrote PowerPoint is Evil in Wired magazine in September 2003, and seems that it has taken nearly 8 years for the US military to have noticed his article.

My frustration comes from the fact that the sort of objective and critical message that Tufte has been promoting hasn’t been listened to. Like all tools, PowerPoint can be very useful. If it is the best way of getting your message across, that’s great. The dangers begin when you start manipulating your message to fit the arbitrary constraints of the tools you are using.

In order to choose the best tool for the job you need to know what your message is, who you are addressing, and how people in your audience react to various communication media. The nature of your message is significant. PowerPoint may be right for displaying the top three reasons to vote for a political party, but it would be wrong for a serious election manifesto, as that is something people need to take time to read carefully. In the case of business and educational presentations – and presentations within the military fall into this category too – it is important to remember that the slides are not the presentation. They are just illustrations.

In his book Presentation Zen Garr Reynolds uses the term “slideument” to describe a slide deck that’s being used instead of a printed document. A good presentation, says Reynolds, is about the speaker and their message, not about the visual images that are on the screen. Presentation handouts should recapitulate the messages from the presentation, and add further explanations, examples, and references, but should not just be print-outs of the slides. In fact, the slides by themselves should be almost meaningless. Presentation Zen should be required reading for anyone who needs to stand up and speak to a business, academic or military audience.

Where the military appear to have got things wrong, and where in my experience many business presenters have got things wrong, is that they have allowed their tools to influence their messages, and perhaps even their thinking. This is clearly dangerous. Don’t let your tools dictate how you say things, let alone what you have to say. First be sure of your message, and be sure it’s right for your audience, and then, and only then, select the right tool to use to deliver it. That way you may even save lives.