Here's some excerpts from that with my highlighting added in yellow.
Does the Military Overuse PowerPoint?
On April 27, The New York Times took a critical look at the discontent among officers in the U.S. military over the increasing emphasis on constructing Power Point briefings for everything from strategic assessments to tactical movements. Aggressive commanders such as Marine Gen. James Mattis and strategic thinkers like T.X. Hammes say the Power Point obsession is dumbing down critical analysis and too often shifts the focus from ends to means. Others, such as CENTCOM commander Gen. David Petraeus, acknowledge the ubiquity of Power Points but insist it is nonetheless a useful tool when used effectively to deliver succinct and detailed information on a strategic or tactical problem.
The Tank asks the experts: Has the U.S. military gone overboard with its passion for Power Point, or is it just a case of briefers using the tool as a crutch to flesh out an otherwise poorly delivered brief?
Michael Gordon (Senior Fellow, Institute for the Study of War, and N.Y.Times correspondent)
H.R McMaster is entirely correct. The amount of information that gets conveyed in 20 Powerpoint slides is probably less than a five page paper. It takes forever to brief it, which limits the time for serious discussion by the audience or the senior officials who are subjected to the presentation.
With Powerpoint, the military has been moving toward an oral tradition and away from the written word, with all the demands for precision, nuance and serious exposition that writing requires. And it's not just a problem for the military. The procedure has become quite common in other areas of government, among contractors and in think tanks.
Sometimes Powerpoint presentations are used as a kind of bureaucratic filibuster: they can be a way to eat up time and restrict the opportunity for hard questions. But even when that is not the intent they are generally not the best means of communication. Clear and concise writing requires that issues be thought through and that is not always necessary if all that is required is to slap a few bullets on a slide.
It would be far more efficient to prepare a concise and analytical paper that provides the essential information and arguments, circulate it in advance and then take questions about the assessment and recommendations at a meeting. If maps, graphics and charts are important they can be attached to the paper as needed. The essential information could be absorbed before the meeting, which could then be devoted to serious debate and discussion. My Times colleague, Elisabeth Bumiller, did the military community a service by highlighting this issue.
Dave Dilegge (Editor in Chief of Small Wars Journal)
There is an element of truth to each of the statements quoted in Elisabeth Bumillers Times article – from General Mattis' "PowerPoint makes us stupid" to General Petraeus endorsing PowerPoint's capability to display maps and graphical trends.
Like any tool of the trade; PowerPoint becomes detrimental when it is abused, especially so when it is used as a substitute for critical thinking or to mask a lack of substance behind the subject. Military blogger Schmedlap summed up the crux of the problem quite nicely, in a PowerPoint slide deck of all things, in his bottom-line: "PowerPoint can be a highly effective tool when used purely to convey information – as in a classroom or general background brief. It is particularly good if strong pictures or charts accompany the discussion of the material. But it is poorly suited to be an effective decision aid".
In regards to the decision aid issue he generically describes the "before" and "after" environment. Before PowerPoint a staff would prepare a succinct 2-3 page paper, a decision-maker would then read that paper, a meeting would be convened with the staff and/or other experts to discuss the issues, and then a decision would be made. After PowerPoint a staff receives a 5-minute brief and then constructs the slides that result in a 20-minute presentation to the decision-maker. After 5-minutes of discussion a decision is made.
Personally, I have a love-hate relationship with PowerPoint. I've been subjected to "death by PowerPoint" more times than I care to remember but do use it to "convey information" in the manner described by General Petraeus and Schmedlap.
Dakota Wood (Senior Fellow at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments in Washington, DC.)
Andrew Krepinevich once wrote, "Simple solutions to complex problems are inherently attractive and almost always wrong." Powerpoint can convey the idea that the most complex issues can be neatly summarized in a series of slides. In an age when people are short on time and, often, attention, this can be very attractive.
Slides are simply easier and quicker to scan than a lengthy report. Powerpoint as a briefing tool has the same challenges as any other used to pass information – the skill of the user, the aptitude/interest of the recipient, and the forum within which it is used. It is good for graphics (maps, imagery, charts) used to quickly provide updates or to focus discussions (e.g. for millennia, military commanders have used maps to shape battle plans). It is a very poor way to transmit the complexity of operations, especially when detached from an accompanying narrative or explanation.
Pre-Powerpoint, field commanders understood the futility of trying to fully capture complexity and nuance in a written order bound to be unintelligible to a recipient tasked with carrying out a mission…hence the importance of the "commander's intent" sub-paragraph, i.e. "if things get so hot and fast moving that the lengthy written order becomes OBE, here is what we're trying to accomplish and why." Clear, concise reporting is important. It is also hard and usually takes time to master.
More important, though, is the effort made by the commander/leader/decision maker to clearly articulate objectives and accompanying rationale when assigning tasks in the first place; time spent questioning underlying assumptions and data sources for reports that come back to him in sitreps; and time spent carefully mulling over the nature of the task/situation before him, vice jumping from issue to issue with only a moment's thought in between.
From the New YOrk Times article (4/27/2010) this refers back to,
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.
Incidentally, I have no problem with the complexity of the chart at the start of this post. Real world problems are like that, dense with interconnections. The point is precisely that there is no way to "flatten out" that network of interactions into a "list" without massive loss of content. Like the mountain, the problem description is not going to "come down to us". We are going to need to "go up to it".
This describes in spades the problem we have with using relational databases, incidentally, for trying to capture snapshots of real world entities. If you go back into the theory underlying relational databases (which I won't ask you to do), you find out how it is that complex, multidimensional objects can be "flattened out" into a set of 2-dimensional tables AND A SET OF RELATIONSHIPS BETWEEN THEM. In the chart above, the tables are the boxes, and the relationships are the arrows.
Because tables are "easy" to understand, and relationships are complex and not so easy to understand, articulate, or describe to a computer, they are often simply "left out." The set of tables, minus all the relationships, is all that remains that allegedly describes the original thing you were trying to capture.
It's not needless to say, it may be more needful to shout, THAT IS ILLEGAL! YOU CAN'T DO THAT! THAT IS WRONG! The complexity is no longer captured by the tables alone. If you leave out the constraints, you just destroyed your content, you might as well have put random numbers or words in all the tables.
Also,a few key things about charts like this one.
What you can do, and must to, to grasp this kind of diagram is work one item at a time. Take one phrase (concept), and, one by one, look at what comes into it, and one by one, look at what comes out of it, and each of THOSE things should make sense as an interaction you understand and can independently assess.
This diagram is partly a 2-D list, but it is more, because you can follow the arrows THROUGH the words and out the other side, looking for LONGER pathways of interactions, or LOOPS. You will never find loops in lists, or even "tree-shaped" lists of lists of lists. The data structure of Powerpoint does not make it easy to see or find LOOPS. That's like trying to describe New York City and leaving out the people. It's not a small oversight or error, it's HUGE.
Another thing is that diagrams like that can be built up, one interaction at a time, using a tool such as Vensim, which can also capture whether the impact of something on something else is to INCREASE it or to DECREASE it. Again, that's a huge step up from a list, because then you can push a button and Vensim will show you all the reinforcing loops (virtuous or vicious spirals) that are embedded in your situation.
If you can even estimate the mathematical relationship between items, Vensim will actually run the simulation you just described, and show you on a graph how any given object (say, troop count in Iraq) will vary with time, under the assumptions and interactions you just gave it. Almost always, you will be surprised by the results. If there are loops, things are almost always "counter-intuitive". You shouldn't trust the model at that point, but should then go back to the real world, and try to decide, in practice, could this actually happen?
And one last really important thing about such diagrams. It is crucial that the intended audience be PRESENT WHILE the diagram is being created, in general. If you simply "drop" this diagram on people, they will instantly go into overload and "tune out" and get exactly zero out of it, except to be annoyed. If people ARE present while the diagram is being teased out, one arrow at a time, from what people in the room know, the diagram will become suddenly totally comfortable, trustable, a great one page summary of the meeting.
And some published work says, if you take a room of hositle stakeholders, and sit them down, and force them to go through the process of building such an interaction diagram, it has a very strong impact on improving relationships between people in the room, not just on getting a diagram. People are initially surprised by interactions that other people suggest, but as they come to understand the interaction, they come to realize the other person is not as stupid as they had originally though, and they realize the legitimacy of the comment that the world is much more complex than they had thought.
It tends to get rid of "Why don't they JUST DO X? " type of conclusions, that can easily follow from looking a Powerpoint cartoons. "Oh, now I see why." is a more common response AFTER the diagram has been painfully worked out. The side effect of improved working relationships between the parties is no small accomplishment, and one you don't see with Powerpoint sessions.
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