Many of today’s diseases can be traced back to the
origins of our species. It’s easy to imagine a prehistoric
painter, who had found a quick and easy way of drawing a
buffalo, covering cave walls with colorful celebrations of
hunting success, regardless of his actual competence in
bringing home food for his family or his tribe.
The “powerpoint syndrome” is a well known
disease, clearly diagnosed not only by brilliant cartoonists
such as Scott Adams, but also in a variety of analyses of
corporate efficiency and communication.
It’s called “disinfotainment”.
It has been found that it can seriously disrupt corporate
communications. Some companies, including Sun, have
banned it from their organization. In the September 2003
issue of Wired magazine there was an article
Power
Corrupts, PowerPoint Corrupts Absolutely by Edward R. Tufte,
professor emeritus at Yale. (His monograph, The Cognitive
Style of PowerPoint, is available from
Graphics Press. His article
PowerPoint
Makes You Dumb was published by the New York Times
Magazine in December 2003.
Here are a few quotations from his interesting comments.
Imagine a widely used and expensive prescription drug
that promised to make us beautiful but didn’t. Instead the
drug had frequent, serious side effects: it induced
stupidity, turned everyone into bores, wasted time, and
degraded the quality and credibility of communication. These
side effects would rightly lead to a worldwide product recall.
Yet slideware – computer programs for presentations
– is everywhere: in corporate America, in government
bureaucracies, even in our schools. Several hundred million
copies of Microsoft PowerPoint are churning out trillions of
slides each year. Slideware may help speakers outline their
talks, but convenience for the speaker can be punishing to
both content and audience. The standard PowerPoint
presentation elevates format over content, betraying an attitude
of commercialism that turns everything into a sales pitch.
Presentations largely stand or fall on the quality,
relevance, and integrity of the content. If your numbers are
boring, then you’ve got the wrong numbers. If your words or
images are not on point, making them dance in color won’t
make them relevant. Audience boredom is usually a content
failure, not a decoration failure.
At a minimum, a presentation format should do no harm.
Yet the PowerPoint style routinely disrupts, dominates, and
trivializes content.
The practical conclusions are clear. PowerPoint is a
competent slide manager and projector. But rather than
supplementing a presentation, it has become a substitute for
it. Such misuse ignores the most important rule of speaking:
respect your audience.
Of course presentation tools existed long before
electronics. There were blackboards, slides, etcetera. Some
of the most beautiful paintings and sculptures of all times
were used to present or support an idea, a way of thinking,
an attitude, a project or an action plan. But most of today’s
powerpoint presentations can’t be called a work of art – or
even an example of effective presentation.
Visual aids can be used effectively. To focus on key
points, to emphasize relevant data, to make things clear. But
it’s unfortunately easy to do the opposite – to muddle, to
confuse or to deliberately warp facts, issues and
concepts.
We know that data, balance sheets, statistics, trends,
projections and forecasts can be manipulated in many ways.
Fifty years ago this was explained very clearly in a
wonderful little book by Darrell Huff: How to Lie with
Statistics. It was published in 1954, it’s still being
reprinted, and it’s as relevant today as it has ever been.
Darrell Huff explained how data can be misused and
misrepresented – by mistake or by deliberate manipulation. He
also showed how they can be additionally warped in a visual
presentation. For instance numbers can be shown using
two-dimensional shapes instead of lines, columns or bars. The
height of the picture indicates the actual quantity, but the
perception of difference or change is twice as large.
By using pictures the effect can be even stronger. The
perception is three-dimensional. If we use the picture of an
animal to show the increase or decrease of a species, or a
cow to represent milk production, we can make it appear
doubled when it actually increased 30 percent. And further
misperceptions can be added by using movement.
Can that be done with money? Yes, of course. Instead of
figures or bar charts one can use banknotes, coins or moneybags.
It’s called “dramatizing”, but it’s
cheating – as Darrell Huff explained fifty years ago,
when there was no electronic slideware to make it easier.
Visual resources, as such, aren’t honest or misleading.
They are tools – and the result depends on how they
are used. A well planned presentation can be “truth well
told”. But if it’s deliberately manipulated it can be a
cheating device – or, if it isn’t carefully planned and
tested, its effect can be quite different from what the
presenter had in mind.
Standardized tools and styles can make things even worse.
Presentations follow a predefined pattern, bore the audience
with repetitive mannerisms instead of catering for its
interests and questions.
An effective presentation needs serious work, care,
competence. It needs to be tried and tested, finding the most
effective form for its specific content, with precise
coherence of visual and textual devices to its intent and
purpose.
Even when technical resources were less easy and more
expensive (costing time, care and commitment as well as
money) there were mistakes and mishaps – as well as
deliberate cheats. But it didn’t happen as often as it does
now, because more effort and specific competence were needed
for its preparation. Things are made worse by the powerpoint
intoxication.
It seems so easy. An elaborate show can be put together
in a few hours. The abundance of tricks and devices
encourages exaggeration. The result is often depressing.
The resources offered by standard slideware are always
the same. As a result presentations often look the same,
though they are dealing with totally different subjects. That
is confusing and boring.
We often see a presenter, imprisoned in a predetermined
format, unable to answer a simple question. Because he or she
is trained to repeat, without any depth of understanding, a
presentation put together by someone else. Even when people
prepare their own presentations, they often get lost in the
mechanics of form and format – and miss the point of what
they were supposed to say.
Another ridiculous consequence is that, after a meeting
or a convention, instead of a written document what is left
behind is a copy of the slides. It’s obvious that slides
prepared to support a presentation are not the appropriate
format for reading – and lack depth of explanation and
information. But haste, habit, and mindless subjugation to
technology lead to the production of useless papers that
confuse the issue (even when they are not deliberately
deceiving).
There are also messy results of
“personalization”. It’s easy, with word processing,
to change a name. Too easy. A document (or presentation) that
on page 1 shows the name of a person, or a company, in the
publishing business reveals on page 12 that it was originally
written for a car dealer.
Things get worse in the case of online communication.
It’s annoying enough to receive a three megabyte powerpoint
attachment to tell us something that could have been said
more effectively in six lines of plain text. But there are
also websites that contain materials poorly adapted from
something that had been obviously prepared for another
purpose. In addition to the well known and widespread disease
of cosmetics prevailing on content.
After many years of serious discussion about usability and content
management, the best website makers know that substance matters
more than appearance. (See The
architect and the gardener.) But many site owners want
things done poorly. Because they don’t understand that the
internet isn’t television. Or because they are infected by the
powerpoint bug. Or because they don’t want to commit manpower
to produce meaningful content. So we are still plagued with a
proliferation of empty boxes, shiny appearances with nothing inside.
The powerpoint syndrome isn’t just the misuse of specific
technology. It’s a cultural disease. The abundance of
resources for makeup and glitz leads to exaggeration and
superficiality. Where appearance prevails on substance, scams
and cheats are more easily disguised. We must learn to tame
the wild proliferation of expressive tools to bring them to
obedience, to the service of what we have to say. If and when
there is something that is really worth saying.
The subject is effectively summarized in this cartoon by
Alex Gregory published in The New Yorker on September 29, 2003.
