PowerPoint is Dead. Long Live PowerPoint. By SWJ Friend “Doctrine Man” at Tom Ricks’ Best Defense
… From crowded operations centers in combat zones far from our shores to the fluorescently-antiseptic hallways of the Pentagon, no phrase will draw a nervous sideways glance quicker than "Death by PowerPoint." Utter those words aloud in any environment and battle captains descend into laptop defilade, staff officers scatter like cockroaches in sunlight, and commanders at all levels sigh in frustration.
PowerPoint hailed the death of critical thinking. The anecdotal evidence is overwhelming: the mind map from the ninth circle of hell, the military's acquisition life cyclorama, or just about any orders "briefing" which typically runs longer than the time required to produce an actual order. PowerPoint has infected our military culture like a digital zombie apocalypse, transforming our leaders into the intellectual equivalent of the living dead. We have met the enemy and he is us.
In Richard Russell's Best Defense post, he rightly identifies a problem rooted in Professional Military Education (PME) and advocates a ban on PowerPoint as a necessary first step in military educational reform. But PowerPoint isn't the problem, it's just a symptom of a deeper problem years in the making. PowerPoint is merely a tool; it's the tool behind the tool with whom we should concern ourselves…
Comments
Personally, I think…
Personally, I think PowerPoint is a great tool that helps a lot in education and is effective and interesting. But this is possible only when the person who creates the PowerPoint presentation has enough quality skills to create them, but because I am not, so I use the services of the service https://papersowl.com/powerpoint-presentations-writing-service, which is considered one of the best PowerPoint presentations writing service. They are very cool, because they can create a presentation very quickly and at the same time very interesting and informative. I like it, so I recommend it.
The time that we commit to developing PPT slides reduces the opportunity for critical discourse or even an abbreviated MDMP. The manhours dedicated to production of deliverables (in the form of PPT) ALWAYS exceeds the number of manhours committed to formulating a sound plan or proposal. The danger lies in our solution to this reality: A shallow pool of contributors announces a plan and directs each staff section to "bolster" the desired image with their PPT slides. The completed presentation is forwarded higher to market the unit. The PPT plan then becomes a document rather than a briefing, marrying the commander to a mile wide and inch deep plan. The staff spends the next year trying to find metrics that will endorse the plan.
I've drifted away from the PPT target and into the realm of planning, however, if we treat the symptom (PPT)we may be able to return to detailed, inclusive planning.
Some of us have been saying this in open clear text for the last oh say eight years but history and the Big Army sidelined our comments.
I would bring this up in Mission Command staff training events and a former retired LTC would literally push back as he saw it as a critique of the Army in general. He himself was so into PPT he could not see the trees in the forest.
By relying in a tool we forgot as an institution on how to think--- instead the tool told us what to think.
Exactly...it is the tool behind the tool. I find it annoyingly amusing that we have so many "Instructor Qualifications" nowadays, but we have amongst us some of the worst instructors/presenters in decades. Whatever happened to "Techniques of Military Instruction (TMI)" & the KISS Principle? I personally like PowerPoint & use it quite frequently...not only to instruct, but for formal briefings, Table top Exercises, etc. The best PPT advice I have received so far is the 6x6 rule...No more than 6 words/boxes across & 6 lines down (Arial 24), with plenty of "White" space, as a guide. It seems that the higher level the headquarters, the more garbage In/Garbage Out they try to cram into one slide. Another point, which goes against some of the experts advice out there, is to not limit the number of slides you use (within reason), assuming you are following the 6x6 rule. Still, relying on PPT is no excuse for NOT being properly prepared for your presentation, rehearsing it in front of someone who is reasonably good at presentations & conducting routine presentations until you are comfortable at doing it...Best Advice: Be Yourself, when in front of an audience...they will either like you, ridicule you, or appreciate your presentation at the least, so what do you have to lose?