In a previous post, I suggested that PowerPoint users should read Edward Tufte to understand the distorting effect that PowerPoint can have on presenting information. Yet, even when people find Tufte’s arguments credible (or even compelling), the cognitive style of PowerPoint is so entrenched in our world today that communicating in any other way can be difficult to imagine. This is particularly true for those whose first experiences making presentations—perhaps in high school or even younger—included a PowerPoint template. Given this, a way to imagine a world without PowerPoint is to look at the world before PowerPoint, and one window into that world is a short scene from a 30-year-old film, The Hunt for Red October (1990). And what is instructive (and a little fun) is picturing how that scene might play out today.

In this three-minute scene, Dr. Jack Ryan, a CIA analyst, is called on short notice to a briefing for top military advisors to the President of the United States. Set during The Cold War, Dr. Ryan has been researching photographs (obtained by British intelligence) of a new Soviet submarine, the Red October—photographs which reveal some concerning characteristics. Moments before entering the briefing room, Dr. Ryan asks his superior, Admiral Greer, “Who’s giving the briefing?” The Admiral responds, “You are.”

What follows is a textbook example of a briefing and one that should be watched by anyone wanting to deliver effective presentations. And yet, something is missing—the cognitive style of PowerPoint.

There are no bullet points in Dr. Ryan’s presentation. There are no sentence fragments projected onto a screen. Every sentence spoken provides clear information or adds context to his narrative. Images are clearly visible, not shrunk down and crammed into a single slide, making them difficult to see. Every image projected to the screen (like every sentence spoken) enhances Dr. Ryan’s narrative rather than detracting from it. Now consider how Dr. Ryan’s presentation would have played out had he used the slide deck below:

The first thing to note is that by the time Dr. Ryan completed his first sentence, each member of his audience would be focusing on something different. Take the first bulleted slide for example. Some in his audience would focus on the big takeaways on the left. Others would focus on the hierarchically arranged bullet points in the middle. And still others would focus on the images to the right, too small to make out. What they would not be focusing on—at least not in full—is what Dr. Ryan was saying.

As Tufte and many others have pointed out, the second we project sentences (or sentence fragments) onto a screen and begin to speak, our audience is faced with a decision: Listen to what we are saying or read the words on the screen. Audiences cannot effectively do both. (If you want to see this phenomenon in practice, try listening to your favorite podcast while browsing the latest headlines or your social media feed. In short order, you will be backing up your podcast to see what you missed.) The question for us as presenters is always, do we want the audience to listen to what we are saying or to read the sentence fragments we are projecting to a screen?

Another more amusing example of shoehorning clear information into a PowerPoint template is Peter Norvig’s Gettysburg Address slide deck, which is featured in Edward Tufte’s book Beautiful Evidence (2006). Yes, apparently even Abraham Lincoln would have benefited from sharing our country’s shared vision and critical success factors as an itemized list. (Not surprisingly, Norvig’s slides were the inspiration for my Jack Ryan slides.)

To be fair, there were bullet points and lackluster presentations before PowerPoint. They just weren’t so easy to make. Moreover, outside of sales and marketing departments, there was no pressure or impulse to put all information into anything resembling a PowerPoint template. And while we cannot blame a software application alone for crowding out more effective ways of sharing information, its grip on the professional landscape was swift and profound and remains so to this day.

So, for now, if you cannot imagine presenting information without PowerPoint, watch Jack Ryan’s briefing.

Up next: Why we abandoned other forms of sharing information so quickly and recommendations for kicking the PowerPoint habit, once and for all.

In many offices today, PowerPoint is everywhere, and so is a particular culture of communication that has accompanied its use for more than 20 years. A few months ago, a connection on LinkedIn shared that his company was taking a page from Amazon by “moving away from PowerPoint for most meetings and important decisions.” Given the price we have paid for choosing bullet points and slides as our primary mode of sharing information for so many years, the fact that other companies (and perhaps a new generation of professionals) are following Amazon’s lead is a welcome development.

PowerPoint is so ingrained in our culture today that many may not know that professionals of various types raised real concerns about its growing use in the 1990s. Viewed as a blessing at first for allowing people to create slide decks more efficiently, it was not long before the characteristic PowerPoint design spread from sales pitches and executive reviews to other parts of the professional landscape, crowding out more effective ways of sharing information. (In my profession, the distorting effect PowerPoint had on meetings and documentation was already branded PowerPoint engineering by the late 1990s.)

Given its prevalence, PowerPoint users should be aware of its side effects, and one of the best warning labels users can read is the work of Edward Tufte.

How Pitching Out Corrupts Within

Few authors have argued what PowerPoint hath wrought more forcefully than Edward Tufte, Professor Emeritus at Yale University and expert in data visualization and the study of presenting information. (Yes, there is an art and a science to presenting information.) A great place to start is his none too subtle The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint: Pitching Out Corrupts Within (2006), a concise, 31-page booklet that is actually a separately published chapter from his book Beautiful Evidence (2006).

In this booklet, Tufte argues that the fundamental layout of PowerPoint presentations “reduces the analytical quality of serious presentations of evidence.” In other words, the characteristic design of PowerPoint presentations—bullet points, sequential slides, low information content per slide—constrains and distorts the very information that presenters are trying to convey. (This may be obvious to anyone who has sat through their share of PowerPoint presentations.)

Tufte further argues that PowerPoint is presenter-oriented and not content-oriented or even audience-oriented, and that it “turns information into a sales pitch and presenters into marketeers,” which “harms the quality of thought” for both the authors and consumers of presentations. Put another way, while PowerPoint makes it easier for presenters to put slide decks together, its use distorts the information presented and hampers thinking about that same information.

While Tufte’s arguments may seem academic at first, they become deadly serious when he examines a case where an overreliance on PowerPoint negatively affected communication in a life or death situation.

Space Shuttle Columbia

On January 16, 2003, the Space Shuttle Columbia lifted-off for what would be its final launch. At nearly a minute-and-a-half into flight, a piece of insulating foam broke from its external fuel tank, striking and mortally damaging Columbia’s left wing. While the foam strike was later observed on video of the launch, the damage to the left wing remained undetected during the shuttle’s 16-day mission. Then, on February 1, during its planned reentry into the atmosphere, the shuttle broke apart, killing all seven astronauts aboard.

While in orbit, engineers from Boeing (the shuttle’s manufacturer) and NASA analyzed the launch video and tried to assess the likelihood that the foam strike had damaged the shuttle’s wing. Ultimately, Boeing prepared three reports, or PowerPoint pitches (the term used by NASA engineers). According to Tufte, whose analysis was included in the final Columbia Accident Investigation report (page 191), the PowerPoint slides “provided [a] mixed reading of the threat to the spacecraft” with lower-level bullets (in the requisite smaller fonts) conveying “doubts and uncertainties” while “executive summaries and big-bullet conclusions were quite optimistic.” In short, senior managers underestimated the threat to the spacecraft due to the optimism conveyed in the slides. From The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint:

Convinced that the reports [the slides] indicated no problem rather than uncertain knowledge, high-level NASA officials decided that the Columbia was safe and, furthermore, that no additional investigations were necessary.

By declaring Columbia safe, efforts to determine if the shuttle was damaged were thwarted.

Several NASA engineers had hoped that the military would photograph the shuttle in orbit with high-resolution spy cameras, which would have easily detected the damage, but even that checkup was thought unnecessary given the optimism of the [three] Boeing reports. And so the Columbia orbited for 16 days with a big undetected hole in its wing.

In the end, the use of PowerPoint was not directly responsible for the fate of Space Shuttle Columbia and its crew. Nevertheless, the pitch out culture arguably did play a role in distorting information at a time when access to clear evidence was urgently needed.

Not every critique that Tufte offers is tied to events as fateful as Space Shuttle Columbia. Nonetheless, Tufte provides much evidence that using PowerPoint to share information has significant, far reaching drawbacks, and that those drawbacks ultimately outweigh the benefits (real or perceived) of its use.

So, if you are a frequent PowerPoint user, read Edward Tufte. Moreover, if you are a PowerPoint user and a practicing engineer, stop right now and read Edward Tufte.

Up next: A world before PowerPoint and some recommendations for kicking the PowerPoint habit, once and for all.

Photo credit: EsaRiutta at pixabay.com.