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...
More at The New York Times.
More and Related:
We Have Met the Enemy and He Is PowerPoint - NYT comment section
The TX Hammes PowerPoint Challenge - Starbuck, Small Wars Journal
Essay: Dumb-dumb Bullets - TX Hammes, Armed Forces Jorunal
Does the Military Overuse PowerPoint? - The Tank
Quagmire! - Jules Crittenden, Forward Movement
PowerPoint Is Evil - Edward Tufte, Wired
"Dumb-Dumb Bullets" and Information Processing - Adam Elkus, Red Team Journal
PowerPoint, Decision-Making, and Useless Staff Work - Reach 364, Building Peace
Who PowerPoint Empowers - Tom Ricks, The Best Defense
How Many SWJ Writers Can You Spot in this Article? - Starbuck, Wings Over Iraq
A PowerPoint Briefing About Why PowerPoint Is Bad... - Schmedlap
Hollow Point Power Point? - GSGF, GrEaT sAtAn"S gIrLfRiEnD
When Technology Is The Problem - Bill Egnor, Firedoglake
Guns and Bullet Points - Julie Weiner, Vanity Fair
Army Discovers PowerPoint Makes You Stupid - Preston Gralla, Computer World
Afghanistan: The PowerPoint Solution - Julian Borger, The Guardian
The Battle for Hearts and Bullet Points - Michael Evans, The Times
The U.S. Military's Fight Against PowerPoint - Althea Manasan, National Post
Beautiful, Pointless Graphs - Andrew Sullivan, The Atlantic
Why the Military Declared War on Powerpoint - Max Fisher, The Atlantic
Pentagon Uses its Noodle to Win War - Brad Norington, The Australian
Baffling PowerPoint Presentation - Daily Mail
PowerPoint Backlash Grinds Onward - David Perera, Fierce Government
The US Military's War On PowerPoint - Kyle VanHemert, Gizmodo
And of course a blast from the past ppt that got many thinking WTF?:
The Gettysburg Powerpoint Presentation - Peter Norvig
Comments
What would GEN Depuy think about PowerPoint? He would love it, but he might use it differently, but not much. GEN Depuy, if I remember correctly liked storyboards. He liked using hand drawn cartoons on VGT to show the key events to "show what its supposed to look like". It was a view that was borne out in the manuals that GEN Depuy helped fashion; draw them a picture, show them what it's supposed to look like. Trouble is that PowerPoint more often then not does not show what the product is supposed to look like. Worse yet because it is used in place of text, the graphics used can not be accessed by text searches and text based data processing. SO the way to fix Powerpoint is to make sure that it does what GEN Depuy might have used it for, to show what its supposed to look like in clear pictures that are easily understood, that is to use PowerPoint for creating and displaying story boards. Many of the people who use PowerPoint in the military do not have the tools that would make it easy to make storyboards on PowerPoint. What TOC has a scanner to be able to scan in images into the presentation? What TOC has the graphics programs anf the digital tablets and the trained personnel? AT least if you have a scanner, someone can dray the storyboard on paper and then scan it in. The only advantage that the PowerPoint gives if hand drawn images are used for storyboarding over the old VGT if that the presentation can be stored as a presentation in PowerPoint while it can not as a VGT.
I think though that if we drive home the point that the PowerPoint is there to tell a story and a storyboard is a very good technique for graphically telling a story, and it can be presented on PowerPoint we might be able to solve some of PowerPoints issues by using it the way that GEN Depuy might have.
I thoroughly enjoyed and agreed with this article. Thank you for posting it! As a speech coach, I just blogged about it in my speaking advice blog, http://sarahgershman.blogspot.com/2010/05/beware-of-powerpoint.html
The term "death by PowerPoint" does not exist for nothing.
Try to get any military decision maker, DARPA, JIEDDO, Army AAR, CTC AAR reviews, BCT Cmdr, research programs to put together a PowerPoint slide presention of TEN or less slides on the topic!
Impossible---what happen in the last six years to convinced everyone that MORE is BETTER?
I use to brief off of three and everyone declared me to be crazy---usually a opening statement, highlights of the total presentation and then take away comments---what more does one need? We have gotten away from being great briefers using the spoken word which actually means one has to understand the subject---PPT just masks non-knowledge.
I heavily recommend Edward Tufte's <a href="http://www.edwardtufte.com/tufte/books_pp">"The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint"</a>, which looks at how the use of PowerPoint led to the 2003 NASA Columbia disaster.