Today in the New York Times an Army General stated that “PowerPoint makes us stupid.” The article cites more examples of how the use of bullet points and neither coherent, well thought out sentences nor imagery along with a story are being used to communicate today.
In General McMaster’s view, PowerPoint’s worst offense is not a chart like the spaghetti graphic, which was first uncovered by NBC’s Richard Engel, but rigid lists of bullet points (in, say, a presentation on a conflict’s causes) that take no account of interconnected political, economic and ethnic forces. “If you divorce war from all of that, it becomes a targeting exercise,” General McMaster said.
The author of the article is right: Don’t blame PowerPoint: Blame the misuse of it.
PowerPoint is an incredibly effective tool, that catch is it must be used properly. Since we are in the information age, the age of instant gratification, efficiency, speed and savings, any corners we can cut to transfer information from one person to another are being taken.
Why did we get like this?
Someone decided to use PowerPoint when something like Word would be a better tool to convey the information and that propagated. Because we are knowledge workers and time is such a “soft cost” the actual amount of money (read: time) spent on understanding and misunderstanding goes unaccounted for and we continue the cycle.
Seth Godin blogged today referencing an ebook he wrote, thinking the ideas would spread and the problem would go away. While I agree that writing an ebook is a great thing, the expectation that it will spread like wildfire and the problem will go away even after a number of years is a little over confident.
Do you frequently have to sit through presentations that don’t engage you? How can you better your communication in your organization? What can you do to improve it? You can start with Seth’s ebook, my ebook, or Jon Thomas‘ ebook. All excellent and all free.
