[Infowarrior] - T.X. Hammes Essay: Dumb-dumb bullets

[Richard Forno]

(See also my 2002 "PowerPoint Manifesto" right on the home page @  
infowarrior.org)

Essay: Dumb-dumb bullets
As a decision-making aid, PowerPoint is a poor tool
By T.X. Hammes
http://www.armedforcesjournal.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.


AFJ 2009 essay contest

AFJ is running its second annual essay contest. Submit an essay of no  
longer than 1,500 words on a PowerPoint presentation that most  
affected your career — for good or bad. The winning essayist will  
receive a set of books recommended by T.X. Hammes; runners up will  
receive book gift cards. The winning essays will be published in our  
November issue. Go to www.armedforcesjournal.com for details.