PowerPoint of Afghan War Strategy 233
eldavojohn writes "Disillusioned by PowerPoint at work? Some members of the US Military view it as 'an internal threat.' Marine Corps General James N. Mattis says, 'PowerPoint makes us stupid,' reaching the same conclusion NASA came to back in 2003. But nothing speaks to this more than the spaghetti-bowl PowerPoint slide of the US Military's strategy in the ongoing war in Afghanistan. The slide causes anyone's eyes to glaze over with confusion so much that General McChrystal jokingly stated when he saw it, 'When we understand that slide, we'll have won the war.' At my job, I know that feeling all too well."
To Give The Devil His Due... (Score:5, Insightful)
For that matter, I'm pretty sure the same was possible before we started doing this with software - it was certainly possible with film slides as well.
There's not really a better alternative (Score:5, Insightful)
When I was in USAF officer training, all the trainees were required to give several briefings throughout the program. We were told that we could use any visual aids we wanted (to include whiteboard, PowerPoint or... who knows.)
All 144 of us used PowerPoint, simply because it was the easiest way to complement what you were talking about.
Re:There's not really a better alternative (Score:5, Insightful)
But was it the best way?
It's not powerpoint (Score:2, Insightful)
Powerpoint isn't the problem, it's large organization management and people who don't want to (or don't have the time) to get into the details..
This is the nature of "summing-up" and presenting to people that do not understand what is being spoon-fed to them.
Re:To Give The Devil His Due... (Score:3, Insightful)
I think you're missing the point. The concern is with the military having institutionalized an ineffective means of intercommunication, using specifically powerpoint as their tool of choice.
Even if they didn't use PP, it would still be referred to by that name as people used to call all photocopies "xerox" and all inline skates "rollerblades".
The process of "quickly" creating slides in the presentations made conducive by the software creates a false sense of understanding, and that is the issue.
Crutch (Score:4, Insightful)
I would make note of several other crutches that should be great but are created by idiots.
Most site index engines, for an example try to find something useful on Symantec's website using their built in KB search.
Photoshop, you got to love all the "professional photographers" who simply apply the latest filter from their torrented CS.
WYSIWYG, pick any, you know what I am talking about here folks, if you don't...well you probably are part of the problem.
Social Media sites, the abuse never ends...I'm looking at you farmtown girl and political right/leftwing nutjob friends.
Any of these items should work and be great tools but there are just too many idiots in the world who dont want to put effort into anything. These people will exist whether the crutches are there or not, but they sure as heck will waste a lot less time.
Re:PowerPoint makes us stupid (Score:5, Insightful)
Does removing PowerPoint make the presenter any smarter or the presentation they've done any clearer? Somehow I doubt having it drawn out on paper will make it any easier for the good general to understand. :p
From TFA:
It’s dangerous because it can create the illusion of understanding and the illusion of control,” General McMaster said in a telephone interview afterward. “Some problems in the world are not bullet-izable.”
Commanders say that the slides impart less information than a five-page paper can hold, and that they relieve the briefer of the need to polish writing to convey an analytic, persuasive point.
When I was serving in the US Navy I don't remember over-head presentations from photocopies of "well written briefs" being any more entertaining or any easier to understand. Sometimes the situation or mission is complicated. There isn't anything you can't write on paper that can't be put in a presentation or it's accompanying printed notes. This sounds a lot more like finger pointing due to failure or incompetence in the field than it does a software limitation. I find it ludicrous that the blame is shifted from incapable leadership and poor communication to a software tool (take special note of the third to the last paragraph). I also find it boggling that the US military can't figure out how to use both presentation and word processing tools at the same time. Is there a reason a five page report can't be written to accompany the presentation? And they wonder why upper level logistics are a mess.
Re:PowerPoint makes us stupid (Score:5, Insightful)
"PowerPoint makes us stupid"
Does it really take a General to tell us that ? ;-))
It might take a general to say the emperor has no clothes.
Here's a pro tip: increase your font size to almost the headline size. Does your message not fit anymore? then delete it. Use words and figures instead.
The problem with information packed slides is that the audience is momentarily given lots of information but having too little time to parse it won't recall it later. And they won't be able to concentrate on your words either. instead put details in slide notes and include those on a printed out version.
There is one exception to this rule: the military quad chart. But quad charts are intentionally dense because you are supposed to linger on them for a long long time.
One more thing: Always label the axes on a plot dammit. and then always tell people in words what the axes are BEFORE you tell them what the plot says.
Re:To Give The Devil His Due... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Not bullet-izable (Score:3, Insightful)
Or, in close quarters, a dagger.
Someday /. will support Unicode. In the meantime... [fileformat.info]
PowerPoint? (Score:5, Insightful)
But nothing speaks to this more than the spaghetti-bowl PowerPoint slide of the US Military's strategy in the ongoing war in Afghanistan.
Projecting a diagram onto a screen does not make the diagram a PowerPoint slide. The complexity of that diagram has nothing to do with PowerPoint.
Re:PowerPoint makes us stupid (Score:5, Insightful)
No, PowerPoint does not make us stupid.
PowerPoint exposes how stupid we already are. It shows that we have a swirling mess of semi-interconnected ideas and when we try to convey them, all we can produce is a swirling mess of semi-interconnected slides.
Re:NASA / Ed Tufte reference (Score:3, Insightful)
For those who do not know, Ed Tufte writes books about how to display information so that it is attractive and easy to understand. His books are fabulous and should be read by anyone who puts information in front of people. We can't all be experts, but we should try not be incompetent.
When I see a slide like the ones being discussed, I see simply too much information. I often make that mistake as well. A slide is a few bits of information. It is not there to impress people with how much you know. It should be there to help them know what you know. It should not be there to show that you know how to use a graphviz.
I pretty much did not do presentation until I started to use Keynote. The animations were easy to use so I could add and relate information on a slide. Equations can be built, substitutions made, chemicals reacted. This to me is useful. It is not just putting a piece of plastic on an overhead. It is using technology to present information in a way that is useful.
War is complex, so you get a complex slide (Score:3, Insightful)
I think the point of that slide is to show that the war is complex and judging by the laughing it worked. It's basically like Primer in this XKCD [xkcd.com] comic, the point is not is understand the picture but to see that its very complex.
Re:There's not really a better alternative (Score:3, Insightful)
Well, put it this way.
If I stand in front of a room full of people and talk for 7 minutes, with no outline or visual aids, people's attention is going to drift. (It may do that anyway, but I'm not going to help it along. :P) In my experience, as a listener, there's no organization to a stream of words coming at you - you have to break down and organize the message on your own, which provides additional strain on the listener, and many people would rather just think about something else. By providing a visual representation of the points you're discussing, a listener can associate the details of what you're saying with the listed main point. Also, you can throw related graphics up to keep the audience's interest.
Plus, it helps keep you on-track as a speaker.
Re:NASA / Ed Tufte reference (Score:3, Insightful)
When I see a slide like the ones being discussed, I see simply too much information
That isn't really the problem. Tufte oftens bemoans low density of data and that Powerpoint tends to guide presentors into that trap with its large fonts, bullet points, and cartoonish graphics.
The spaghetti slide in the NYT article has around 200 word groups with 13 of them in larger typeface than the others. These are grouped together in 7 colors. And there are many many lines that appear to illustrate one way relationships binding them all together. If you leave aside the lines that isn't exactly a whole lot of data. The Minard graphic Tufte likes to display at his courses has far more data represented and it illustrates complex relationships between sets of data without shitloads of lines all over the place.
But in saying that Powerpoint makes us dumb Tufte is saying that some problems are indeed too complex to be reprsented in Powerpoint fashion. I don't see how that spaghetti diagram, even if it is the best way to represent that data which I doubt, could be comprehensible to anyone when projected on a screen, whether that was being done by Powerpoint or Keynote or whatever else. So they've taken an issue that is complex and forced it to fit the presentation rather than forced the presentation to fit the complexity of the issue.
There are some very intelligent people in the military just as there were in NASA when the Challenger was launched. Rocket scientists even. It isn't that they can't comprehend the information in that spaghetti map or O-ring failure by temperature data, it is, as you point out, presenting it in a way that is useful to them.
Re:PowerPoint makes us stupid (Score:3, Insightful)
When you go to write something, an essay or a brief or something of that sort, you generally start stupid. You have a dubiously coherent mass of questionably formed notions. It's ghastly. However, because of the way the essay format works, you will have a very hard time getting away with that. If you don't clean your ideas up, think things through, force them into some semblance of coherent order, your essay will be transparently worthless.
Powerpoint, though, makes it a relatively simple and mechanical exercise(and let us not even mention the dreaded "autocontent wizard". The mere existence of such a monster should tell you everything you need to know about the epistemological framework in which Powerpoint is operated...) to transfer the confused morass of half-formed ideas that you start with straight to the page.
Re:To Give The Devil His Due... (Score:3, Insightful)
I don't think it is fair to blame this directly on Microsoft. There are, after all, other programs available today that allow you to make terrible presentations. If the talk had been done instead in Apple Keynote, OpenOffice, or any other program, it still would have been possible to make massive, mind-numbing, information-lacking, slides.
For that matter, I'm pretty sure the same was possible before we started doing this with software - it was certainly possible with film slides as well.
The huge difference was that with film slides -- at least the ones you had to expose with a 35mm camera, or the ones you drew up by hand -- was that the author's actual or perceived difficulty or cost was a damping factor. It make the authors think before making a presentation (anyone other than me remember how expensive a box of overhead sheets were?), and carefully consider what to say and how to say it.
With everything computerized, it's too easy to run off at the mouth, as it were, because the incremental cost of doing so isn't another overpriced sheet of blank acetate and the time to hand-draw the slide, but essentially zero. (You see the same thing on social media sites where photo albums comprised of two dozen nearly, but not quite, identical photos are commonplace.) There is no external cost function forcing the author to self-edit, and we, as a society, have not yet developed the educational infrastructure to promote editorial awareness. Seriously, editing --- the art of reducing excesses of source material into a small, coherent presentation --- is hard and should be taught starting in secondary school. Witness this Slashdot article, we as a society are starting, slowly to understand the problem exists, and, hopefully, we'll begin to work to fixing it.
Re:NASA / Ed Tufte reference (Score:4, Insightful)
Ed Tufte's real issue in the article is failing to recognize that the purpose of that presentation was not to inform the audience but to protect the presenter. That sort of thing is common in any organization whenever the topic is "how we screwed up".
Re:PowerPoint makes us stupid (Score:4, Insightful)
Yes, but Google is trying to take over the world, not just Afghanistan, which is way less that 10% of the landmass of Earth.
It's a picture of a model (Score:1, Insightful)
Has no one noticed that this is a systems dynamics diagram, an attempt to understand all of the relevant forces related to the conflict. Of course it is complex. And, yes, if it an adequate model, when we understand the slide (the model) we will have won the war.
Re:PowerPoint makes us stupid (Score:5, Insightful)
Um, no.
"Clean" slides are at least as dangerous as cluttered ones.
If your message does not fit on a slide, then don't use a fucking slide.
Some things are too complex to be reduced to bullets. The answer to that is not to bury the complexity in supplemental material that nobody will ever read. All that does is to create the illusion of comprehension... more dangerous than knowing that you don't have a clue. If you know you don't know, you'll either find out, or you'll let somebody else deal with the problem. If you think the problem is simple, but it's not, you'll make stupid decisions.
Don't put up a bunch of "keywords" on a screen to hypnotize the audience. SPEAK to the audience. Flash keywords if you must, but don't leave a slide up there for people to read while they miss the thread of what you're saying, or forget to think about anything that doesn't happen to have fit into the five available lines. And leave yourself some flexibility to respond when they're not getting it, instead of blindly continuing down the track your slides set for you.
Don't waste a lot of time making pretty slides, either. They're basically distracting and misleading. In fact, maybe you should write those keywords on a blackboard.
Is all your information in your slides? Can you say, with a straight face, "read my slides and you'll understand"? Then that's not a presentation. That's what we used to call a "document". Use a document preparation tool for that, not a presentation tool.
Is it too complicated to say in a presentation? Then a document is indeed right for you. Write one. Let people read it. MAKE them read it; don't give them a simplified spoon-fed version that produces false understanding. That's right, people need to actually read and write real text. Can't read and write? Sorry, you don't belong here.
Sure, use charts and graphs. That's what PowerPoint is actually good for. Make sure your analysis and data presentation are respectable, though... you can easily create a graph that gives a thoroughly wrong impression of what's important.
And that Afghanistan slide actually makes a great point. It says "This is complicated, you idiots. Don't knee-jerk". That's a slide I might actually use.
Re:PowerPoint makes us stupid (Score:3, Insightful)
My presentation philosophy: the presentation is NOT the powerpoint document. It's me talking in a way that makes a point.
The powerpoint is there to give them something more interesting to look at than me, to help them keep track of what point we're on, and sometimes to provide an illustration or diagram.
If I have to alter what I'm going to say so it can fit powerpoint slides, I'll just hand out a stack of bumperstickers.