The Perversity of PowerPoint

Fresh from a holiday to Barcelona and Italy, I have been busy attacking my "to read" pile, when I came across this story, which illustrates the perversity of PowerPoint. And while it has nothing to do with digital publishing per se -- it has everything to do with effective communication.

This image was shown to General Stanley A. McChrystal, leader of American and NATO forces in Afghanistan, to convey the complexity of the war.

And while the image certainly succeeded it also lead Gen. McChrystal to quip: “When we understand that slide, we’ll have won the war” -- which was followed by uproarious laughter -- probably not the creator's intention.

Finally. It may have taken a four-star general to opine what many of us have felt for years: that PowerPoint is not the medium for all things -- and certainly not for something as complex as war strategy. But think about something else: How many wo/man-hours went into creating this? You don't just slap this together (despite the fact that it looks like it was). Hours and hours were spent trying to pull something together that fell flat with its audience. And how many hours of productivity were lost by the members of the audience who had to sit through a mind-numbing presentation.

Effective communicators hate slide decks. They know that to connect with their audience -- they need to "read" the non-verbal cues and have listened to the conversations going on just before -- and tack accordingly. An effective communicator interacts with his or her audience -- hard to do when one is supposed to follow a scripted slide show. Personally I find decks to be cumbersome and counter-productive, and would prefer to go low tech -- or at most to use slides that illustrate a point.

A deck is a crutch -- usually, and I am on a limb here, for people who don't know what is going on -- or, more charitably, for those who do but who are nervous in front of crowds, or finally, for those who have a message to get out -- and don't care about the audience. PowerPoint is an anthama to the Hallmark slogan "When You Care to Send the Very Best." Stick a Don't in there.

While we talk about cost of time to produce these beasts of boredom -- how about what it costs to actually sit through them?? Dave Paridi, co-author of "Guide to PowerPoint," calculates the losses  from poor PowerPoints -- looking merely at the work to it takes to clarify a poor presentation. Frankly I think he way understates the losses.  Nowhere does he address the amount of lost productivity from the people who had to sit through the poor presentation to begin with -- and could they have received that information in some other format that would have been faster and more effective.

The reality is, we don't create a video for every instance of communication, and PowerPoint should not be the de facto messenger either. Think of slides as exclamation points -- and use sparingly.