0.3: Death to PowerPoint

‘PowerPoint makes us stupid’

I don’t have to tell you PowerPoint sucks. You already know that. Everyone hates it, but we all just keep on using it. Back in 2010, then GEN James Mattis told us all, ‘PowerPoint makes us stupid’. 14 years later, the program is as entrenched in our culture as ever.

The cost of PowerPoint being your organization’s lingua franca is agility and knowledge. Because of everyone’s comfort with PowerPoint, the software took over our entire processes. It transformed into a catch-all tool for everything, which does more harm than good to systems and processes. The program becomes the driver of your organizational culture, not your operational requirements. Your team’s culture will find they have the same limitations as PowerPoint. These failings are why companies like Amazon and Stripe have gotten rid of it. Bezos instead opts for forced readaheads in the first 30 minutes of a meeting, where they review a ‘six-page memo’ format. Their focus is on finding solutions, not just passing information.

There are three primary reasons why PowerPoint is so bad. The first is it’s not designed for collaboration or data, but for performance. The second way PowerPoint is strangling your organization is because it converts the digital back into analog. And lastly, it puts staffs back inside the box. Literally.

Thanks For Coming to My Ted Talk

PowerPoint is for presenting information, which is why that was the original name for the software: Presenter. It’s for Ted Talks and lectures. Except most of the Army isn’t performing at Ted Talk level. An incomplete list of common PowerPoint presentation sins includes:

• A 30-minute presentation with more than 60 slides

• Wasted pieces of format flare that crowd the top and bottom, and inevitably are in the wrong font

• More than 500 words crammed onto a single slide in miniscule six-point font

• Presenters reading their slides, word by word

• Briefs full charts with too many colors and no logic to them, just a chromatic assault on your eyes

• Using build slides¹

If you’ve been in the military for more than a year, you’ve been subject to each of these. As this post is going up on a Saturday, there might be some poor bastard reading this who experienced every single one just in the last week. Those are all just presentation transgressions though. I loathe them too, but I really hate PowerPoint for what it does to data.

‘My Slide Didn’t Get Updated’

PowerPoint converts the digital back into analog. I know at first glance that sentence seems absurd. PowerPoint files are digital, aren’t they? The paradox is the way we use them, they really aren’t. To put data into a slide, we copy and paste it out of the database it was in, and into a table (at best) or a screen grab (at worst).²

That information is now divorced from its database. It is dead. It will no longer update. You can’t interrogate it and you can’t connect it to other data. Instead, it gets consumed in analog form, through varied wavelengths of red, green, and blue light, either from a projector screen, or printed out on pieces of paper. Analog.

Our staffs are bloated butcher shops, killing all this data and copy-pasting it onto slides week after week. The work of compiling all the updates often requires at least one additional soldier who sets a deadline on changes just to make sure they get into a ‘final brief’. Inevitably, someone misses the deadline. Every. Single. Week.

Because the dead data is decaying, we tend to mask the rotting smell by simplifying it. A list of all the late NCOERs becomes just a box with a percentage for each company.³ But averages often mask underlying issues. When Alpha Company is preening because they're at 76% and Bravo Company is only at 73%, we’re no longer engaging directly with the data and fixing our issues. Instead, we’ve reduced a meeting like Command and Staff to an absurd wiener dog race over empty percentage scores.⁴

PowerPoint is also one of the reasons none of our data systems talk to each other. When everything is just going to get slain and served up on the same PowerPoint plate, there’s no incentive to have MEDPROS talk to IPPS-A or DTMS or SOFReady. So, none of these programs integrate. This means there’s tons of redundancy, lagging data, and no attempt at efficiency.⁵

Back in the Box

Using PowerPoint as the primary means of communication in your headquarters routinely stymies innovation and collaboration. It puts everyone back into an infinitely repeating fractal of confining rectangles.

The problem starts when, in a struggle to fit all the information onto a single text, a staff officer must choose between bad and worse. Bad is to shave off the details and context, reducing things to just bullet points and averages. Over three levels of staff this process reduces the resolution of your data until it is meaningless. The worse option is to reduce the font size so small that regardless of how much information you’ve crammed onto a single slide, no one can read it.

The problems begin to compound. Each slide is its own box, not connected to any of the others. You can only see one slide at a time, forcing those attendees in your meeting who aren’t lucky enough to warrant a printout to try and keep it all in their working memory. Working memory is not very good at this.⁶

But beyond just the presentation, our staffs work in these boxes. While doing MDMP we put facts on one slide, assumptions on another, and then the collection plan on a third. Then we assign each slide to three different staffers.⁷ But these should all be connected, with assumptions building off of facts, and our collection plans designed to answer those assumptions. Disconnected on separate slides, there’s no coherent plan.

While training in the Special Forces Officer’s Course (18A), our instructor banned us from using PowerPoint for planning. Instead, we had to use a wall of white boards. This meant we could see the connections between tasks, risks, mitigations, and constraints as we built our plan. There are ways to do this digitally and disaggregated, but PowerPoint is not one of them.⁸

A One-Way Flow of Information

PowerPoint is ‘contrary to serious thinking’, and it typically discourages reflection and collaboration across the staff. ‘PowerPoint Deep’ means not at all. It means a commander who doesn’t know what he’s talking about. Everyone’s focus instead goes to filling out templates and making sure all the pieces of flair for your unit are correct. The staff wastes time worrying over if they have enough legal paper or if the whole brief needs to be redone in 4:3 so it looks pretty printed out.

What little information remains almost always flows only up toward command, with little concern for who else needs to know, and no thought to what other data could be connected to it, never mind distributed down.

Now, with all that said, PowerPoint is not completely bad. It does have its uses, two notable ones. But you’re going to have to wait for a much later post the get those out of me.

I came to bury PowerPoint, not to praise it.

1. Just don’t. Ever.

2. You can embed excel tables into PowerPoint slides, however the process is just complicated enough most common users mess it up, so when they share the file, the connection is broken, and the data no longer refreshes.

3. NCO Evaluation Report, an annual report card on how a soldier is performing used by their next promotion board, OERs are for warrants and officers

4. More on this in 3.4: What To Do With All Those Gains.

5. These are all army personnel data systems. MEDPROS tracks medical readiness, but updates appear to be done via Pony Express. IPPS-A is a $10 billion dollar personnel system currently cosplaying as the wreck of the Titanic. DTMS - Digital Training Management System is so bad even the Chief of Staff of the Army hates it. SOFReady - formerly named DefenseReady, is SOCOM’s personnel software which is reviled by the force.

• As a data nerd, you’d think I’d like these programs, but in fact everything you hate about them, data nerds like me really hate about them.

6. In MS Office applications, hit ctrl-N to open the file in multiple instances, allowing you to see multiple slides / worksheets / etc. at the same time. I didn’t know this shortcut until way later than I wish I had.

7. Military Decision Making Process - the army’s seven step process to problem solving. Well, it’s 7 if you don’t count the 44 sub-steps, and the 26 sub-sub-steps.

8. See 2.07: Get Your Battle Captain Back.