McMaster's strategy brought a number of important changes to military doctrine, but one receiving a great deal of attention this week is his banning of Powerpoint. Military presentations and meetings tend to rely heavily on Powerpoint presentations--too heavily, say critics. The institutional reflection began in January with a much-circulated report. Are they right? Here's the war against Powerpoint.
Why It's a Concern
The New York Times' Elisabeth Bumiller reports on senior military leaders' "serious concerns that the program stifles discussion, critical thinking and thoughtful decision-making. Not least, it ties up junior officers — referred to as PowerPoint Rangers — in the daily preparation of slides, be it for a Joint Staff meeting in Washington or for a platoon leader’s pre-mission combat briefing in a remote pocket of Afghanistan."
'Makes Us Stupid' Foreign Policy's Tom Ricks quotes Marine General James Mattis "The reason I didn't use PowerPoint is, I am convinced PowerPoint makes us stupid." Ricks adds, "I don't know if I'd go that far, but its absence of verbs does seem to me to emphasize aspirations without saying what actions we intend to take to realize them."
Powerpoint Against Powerpoints The Boston Globe cheekily presents their case against Powerpoint as, you guessed it, a Powerpoint presentation:
• Radically simplifies decision-making.
• Erodes etiquette. Endless litany of eye-glazing slides in darkened room promotes antisocial behavior — i.e., texting, napping during meetings.
• "i hate powerpoint’" —> 1,040,000 Google hits
• Creates illusion of progress. When in doubt, add more slides!
Shows Military's Reliance on Windows Spencer Ackerman muses, "Whatever the merits of PowerPoint, the baseline reason why officers use it — and use it and use it and use it — is because the military as a whole uses some version of Windows as its operating system. ... This fundamental dependence is true at the highest levels of command down to the crummiest MWR tent at the most ad-hoc combat outpost."
Didn't Begin With Powerpoint Liberal blogger John Cole remembers, "in my day, it was all about what we called 'cheese charts.' The great big easels (military issue, of course), with pads of paper the size of Montana sitting on them, with bullet point after bullet point. All they’ve done now is gone high-tech."
Our Powerpoint Political Discourse Moderate Voice's Jason Arvak shakes his head. "'PowerPoint culture' — the reduction of everything to standardized bullet points — is increasingly the strategic culture of American politics more generally. One need only look at the pathetic state of political discourse to see the hallmarks of a PowerPoint presentation. Propose health care reform? Here comes the 'socialism' bullet point. No definition, specification, or discussion needed, mind you. The bullet point invokes the mental script and the non-debate pretty much proceeds on autopilot from there, replete with predictable graphical transitions to the next slide."
GCN asks whether or not this is a hopeless battle.
Kudos to military leaders for fighting the good fight, but is this a winnable war? It’s not as if the coma-inducing effects of slideshows haven’t been known for years. Back in January 2000, Peter Norvig created his classic send-up of PowerPoint, putting the Gettysburg Address into a stultifying set of bullet points. A 2003 New Yorker cartoon depicts the devil conferring with one of his minions: “I need someone well-versed in the art of torture — do you know PowerPoint?” A few years ago, a military forum posted “The Ballad of the PowerPoint Ranger,” a tribute to the downtrodden grunts who spend their time making slides for the brass. Graphic design guru Edward Tufte, now working for the Obama administration, has railed against PowerPoint for years.
And even back in 2004, we were asking how we got to this point...
It's not precisely clear how PowerPoint evolved from an office novelty into one of the world's most widely used software programs. About 300 million people worldwide use it to create more than 30 million bullet-point-laden slide presentations every day.
...
In December 2001, President Bush received a PowerPoint briefing from Gen. Tommy Franks on options for invading Iraq. A year later, political adviser Karl Rove gave Bush bulleted PowerPoint slides to show which leadership qualities to emphasize in his reelection campaign.
In February 2003, Secretary of State Colin Powell used PowerPoint slides showing satellite photos of suspected Iraqi weapons facilities to convince the U.N. General Assembly that Iraq was a world threat. A month earlier, engineers had given PowerPoint summaries to NASA executives about damage to the doomed space shuttle Columbia from a piece of foam that struck its wing during liftoff. And in the early days of the Bush administration, counterterrorism chief Richard Clarke wrote his plan to "roll up" the al Qaeda terrorist network using, what else, PowerPoint.
These are some of the program's sexiest implementations. But PowerPoint is ubiquitous throughout the federal bureaucracy, trotted out even for mundane conference speeches or working group meetings. In many of those gatherings, it's almost expected.
It's common, however, to find people who don't know how to use the presentation maker. Microsoft advertises that PowerPoint will "improve the way you create, present and collaborate on presentations." But more often, clear-thinking, articulate people who use PowerPoint are transformed into muddied, monotonous speakers who shoehorn their thoughts into bullet points and anesthetize audiences with their slide shows.
A growing body of research suggests that, far from illuminating people's thoughts, PowerPoint actually obscures them. And now a debate is brewing across government as PowerPoint critics and adherents ask, "Is this any way for us to communicate?" Considering the momentous deliberations in which PowerPoint is employed, it's not such a bad question.
By: Brant
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1 comment:
This is the dumbest discussion I've ever seen. It's the perennial bad craftsman blaming his tools. The problem here isn't power point, it's the incompetence of its users. How many times have I seen a presenter put of a slide black with text and stand there and read it to me. It's that sort of non-sense that is causing this debate. If people sit in the room and just go to sleep rather than engage the presenter with howls of derision, then the blame is theirs too. PP slides are a prop for facilitating discussion. They should be simple, and represent basic jumping off points for the deliverer to launch and engage his audience.
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