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PowerPoint: death of decision making

“[PowerPoint is] dangerous because it can create the illusion of understanding and the illusion of control,” General McMaster, in the article about the (ab)use of PowerPoint in military decision making (The New York Times, April 26, 2010).

I would have missed the whole article, if not for its illustration:

The ease of making the neat-looking slides freed the folks from the responsibility of designing information.

The best article on the subject of PowerPoint slide-ology is Dumb-dumb bullets by T.X. Hammes (AFJ).  Read the article entirely. It talks about the way information distributed and decided upon in hierarchical organizations (almost all of us work in hierarchical organizations).  It touches the pshycology of decision making and the dangers of faster and faster decisions.

Here are the author’s main points:

Thinking is often relegated to producing bullets,  eliminating the intellectually demanding work of condensing a complex issue to two pages of clear text.

If a presenter uses the full paragraphs to convey the ideas on slides, it creates another problem: people need time to think about, even perhaps reread, material about complex issues. Sometimes the listeners try to focus on one paragraph of interest, while the presenter is reading another.  Nothing is fully absorbed and digested.

Pernicious growth in the amount of information portrayed on each slide – some of them become infamous quad charts (4 slides per screen). There is such thing as TMI, but the folks frequently forget to edit it.

The ease of putting together a PowerPoint presentation created an impossible tempo for decision makers. Thus senior decision-makers are making more decisions with less preparation and less time for thought.

Who makes the decisions? Because the PowerPoint culture allows decision-makers to schedule more briefs per day, many type-A personalities seek to do so. Most organizations don’t need more decisions made at higher levels. But to find more decisions to make, a type-A leader has to reach down to lower levels to find those decisions.

Tags: decision making, information design, power point, powerpoint