We Have Met the Enemy and He Is PowerPoint
April 27th, 2010Via: New York Times:
Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, the leader of American and NATO forces in Afghanistan, was shown a PowerPoint slide in Kabul last summer that was meant to portray the complexity of American military strategy, but looked more like a bowl of spaghetti.
“When we understand that slide, we’ll have won the war,” General McChrystal dryly remarked, one of his advisers recalled, as the room erupted in laughter.
The slide has since bounced around the Internet as an example of a military tool that has spun out of control. Like an insurgency, PowerPoint has crept into the daily lives of military commanders and reached the level of near obsession. The amount of time expended on PowerPoint, the Microsoft presentation program of computer-generated charts, graphs and bullet points, has made it a running joke in the Pentagon and in Iraq and Afghanistan.
“PowerPoint makes us stupid,” Gen. James N. Mattis of the Marine Corps, the Joint Forces commander, said this month at a military conference in North Carolina. (He spoke without PowerPoint.) Brig. Gen. H. R. McMaster, who banned PowerPoint presentations when he led the successful effort to secure the northern Iraqi city of Tal Afar in 2005, followed up at the same conference by likening PowerPoint to an internal threat.
“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.”
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.
Commanders say that behind all the PowerPoint jokes are serious concerns that the program stifles discussion, critical thinking and thoughtful decision-making. Not least, it ties up junior officers — referred to as PowerPoint Rangers — in the daily preparation of slides, be it for a Joint Staff meeting in Washington or for a platoon leader’s pre-mission combat briefing in a remote pocket of Afghanistan.
Research Credit: ottilie
For anyone unfamiliar with Edward Tufte’s work, run, Do Not Walk, to http://www.edwardtufte.com and
kick back for a heavy browse…
For those already familiar with Tufte, see his attacks on PowerPoint. Funny, incisive.
http://www.edwardtufte.com/tufte/powerpoint
For those who may have even bought one or two of his excellent books on visualization and presentation of data, I recommend in the strongest possible terms that you attend one of his seminars. In 15+ years of ‘professional education’, his seminar was, by far, the best value, the most lusciously presented, and the most idea-packed I have ever attended.
http://www.edwardtufte.com/tufte/courses
( Sorry if this comes across like an ad for Tufte. It’s not; at least, I get nothing out of it except for the hope of introducing someone to these great ideas.)
His website is a bit slow lately. This could be due to his recent White House appointment. (Don’t hold that against him.)