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Old 07-29-2009, 10:01   #1
Warrior-Mentor
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PowerPoint and Decision Making

Dumb-dumb bullets:
As a decision-making aid, PowerPoint is a poor tool

By T.X. Hammes

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.

(continued)
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Old 07-29-2009, 10:04   #2
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Continued

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.
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Old 07-29-2009, 11:44   #3
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PowerPoint - Used and Abused

I taught a "Presentation Skills Workshop" that included the uses and abuses of PowerPoint. PowerPoint, like any tool can be useful in skillful hands and a disaster without the communication skills that must stand behind any presentation.

PowerPoint is not the appropriate tool for all meeting types. The "working meeting" type where a decision is expected at the end is not one I would advise.

Furthermore, PowerPoint provides many "dressing it up" features that are overused and in many cases inappropriately used.
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Old 07-29-2009, 16:49   #4
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As an AS3/LNO between our MiTT (FID) team and parent BN during our last deployment I spent time providing two reports to dual HHQ. One was a "Blue-1" report which was a Word Doc. I would summarize daily activities and operations as well as provide the next 48 hours worth of planned OPNs. It took me 30 minutes to complete. Any graphics, imagery, photos, or visual files I included as an appendix and referenced in the relevant paragraph.

The other was a story board. I spent more than an hour making it pretty. It consisted of incomplete bullet points and pictures crammed onto one or two powerpoint slides. It contained less than 1/4 of the information a Blue-1 did and took twice as long.

Not only can powerpoint stifle the thought process it simply eats up time that leaders could and should be spending on the ground observing and adjusting intent being met/not met.

This is why I am glad the MCCC (formerly ICCC) teaches the CO Phase analog. We had too many guys spending time getting slides "right" in the BN phase that we lost significant quality on the inputs/outputs of MDMP.
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Old 07-29-2009, 18:12   #5
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The absolute worst was the USASFC Quarterly Training Brief (at least it was in 1990). We collected all the briefs from all the units and I spent days on that thing just making the slides all look the same (colors, font sizes, tables, etc., etc.,) We're talking hundreds of slides and back then it was Harvard Graphics and Word Perfect.
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Old 07-30-2009, 18:36   #6
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An excellent article!
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Old 08-04-2009, 15:54   #7
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One of the worst faults of power point is that it is much like opinion polls. The presentation can be made to influence the decision toward a certain direction by what is placed on the slides as "important facts". This then leaves the other 90% of the information to be assumed to be "not important facts". Thus you have a person who 1. cannot, or 2. will not or 3 should not make the decision effectively making the decision. When discussion is limited to what is on the slides (as it usually is) and the last slide presents "options" the ability to have innovative solutions not on the slide based upon data not presented goes right out the window.

Finally, the most common two errors are for the technical expert to assume the management expert understands what is being said and that information is actually being conveyed. And secondly, for the management experts to assume they don't need to hear from the technical expert. After 30 years of being an engineer it is pretty plain to me that I convey technically important facts very poorly to lay people but that does not diminish the importance of the facts. The most notable of those facts was that during the lead in drinking water crisis in Washington DC, that there was going to be a head on collision with bacterial contamination. I warned management as best I could and in the aftermath of the problem I was told by one of the managers who ignored my warning that it was just a "lucky guess" on my part. The morale of the story is that there are BS artists who make their living running their mouth about things they know nothing about and then there are people who actually know but whose chief skills are not in the verbal category. The space shuttle Challenger was in that same category - the engineer knew, but the management did not believe it to be an "important fact".
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Old 08-04-2009, 16:24   #8
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Amen! This is a great article!
When I was at SWC as a young Action Officer my boss, (LTC) explained it to me. "When you can condense two weeks of work, 200 pages of notes, and what everyone else with a chop thinks of your project, into three 3X5 cards, THEN YOU understand it."

He also taught me "An action passed is an action completed."

I remember how Action Officers would wander the office and the halls looking for others to "Hey, take a look at this and tell me what you think". If you were trapped or you liked the guy you'ld say, "Sure, lemme see it." Then put your hands in your pockets and make him actually hold it in front of you. As long as your hands were in your pockets he couldn't get your fingerprints on it. E-mail killed that!

try this for an endorsement. "Read Without Interest, Returned Without Comment. Resubmit In Thirty Days For Final Disapproval."

Last edited by Penn; 08-14-2009 at 04:18. Reason: Persec
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Old 08-04-2009, 19:16   #9
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Garbage in -- garbage out

What in the past required thinking, analysis, and preparation for the decision-maker has spawned planning based on a pitch which may only be -- "Powerpoint deep."

Scratch below the slide and is there anything there?
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Old 08-05-2009, 09:13   #10
Dozer523
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I know I deserve what's coming, but I post this anyway.

(To the tune of "The Green Berets")

Requests are made, from day to day,
Briefings held, and changes made.
Graphics slides, a must they say,
and PowerPoint is the only way.

Computers crash, and printers stall,
Overloading protocol.
Network's down and soldiers cry,
Briefing's late so heads will fly.

Pin PowerPoint Slides upon my chest,
Full-color slides, they look the best.
One Hundred Slides were made that day,
But only 3 were ever displayed.

A smile came on the General's face,
Slides were done and looked just great!
T'was up all night, worked really late,
Just to hear, the General state:

My soldier son, your slides were great,
Briefing's done, slides up to date.
One problem son, the color's wrong,
One more chance, or you go home.

So tell my mom, I've done my best.
Pin PowerPoint Slides on my chest.
One hundred slides were made that day,
But only 3 were ever displayed.
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Old 08-05-2009, 09:22   #11
Richard
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Once upon a time there were flimstrip projectors and an LP which emitted a beep when it was time to change the pic - then there were VGTs in hull defilade stacked next to an overhead projector - and now it's a laptop w/projector and endless PPTs. Wonder what's next - an R2D2 unit with a holographic display function?

For those stuck in a staff or school house, there's this fabulous resource:

http://www.cafepress.com.au/sldotcom/456583

Richard's $.02
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Old 08-05-2009, 09:43   #12
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Warrior-Mentor View Post
Dumb-dumb bullets:
As a decision-making aid, PowerPoint is a poor tool

By T.X. Hammes

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.
IMO There is something worse and far more insidious than the Power Point slide concerning the military decision making process; and that is the use of an attorney in the real time combat decision process.

Personally anyone involved in the combat decision process should be on the F***ing battlefield and not making decisions 10,000 miles away in a cozy office with her feet up on a desk drinking a low fat latte.

And that's all I have to say about that.

TS
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Old 08-06-2009, 16:54   #13
greenberetTFS
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Dozer523 View Post
I know I deserve what's coming, but I post this anyway.

(To the tune of "The Green Berets")

Requests are made, from day to day,
Briefings held, and changes made.
Graphics slides, a must they say,
and PowerPoint is the only way.

Computers crash, and printers stall,
Overloading protocol.
Network's down and soldiers cry,
Briefing's late so heads will fly.

Pin PowerPoint Slides upon my chest,
Full-color slides, they look the best.
One Hundred Slides were made that day,
But only 3 were ever displayed.

A smile came on the General's face,
Slides were done and looked just great!
T'was up all night, worked really late,
Just to hear, the General state:

My soldier son, your slides were great,
Briefing's done, slides up to date.
One problem son, the color's wrong,
One more chance, or you go home.

So tell my mom, I've done my best.
Pin PowerPoint Slides on my chest.
One hundred slides were made that day,
But only 3 were ever displayed.
Dozer, You never cease to amaze me.................

Big Teddy
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Old 08-06-2009, 20:15   #14
Dozer523
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Quote:
Originally Posted by greenberetTFS View Post
Dozer, You never cease to amaze me.................

Big Teddy
I just copied it! I didn't write it! So it's not QUITE sacrilege.
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Old 08-13-2009, 21:54   #15
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That is how MDMP is conducted in many units around us including mine and how daily products are worked. I can't count how many times I heard the S2 being admonished by the BC about font and color on the GRINTSUM or S2 assessment slides pushed up to higher. We spend more time on formatting the slide and make it pretty than actually planning and putting on the information.

You need to go to the following link and follow the instructions before posting again.

http://www.professionalsoldiers.com/...ead.php?t=3452

Richard
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