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Radhika Panjwani is a former journalist from Toronto and a blogger.
Some years ago, Eric Bergman, a Greater Toronto Area-based author and presentation skills consultant, watched a portfolio manager deliver a sales spiel to a room full of prospective clients.
A few minutes into the talk, Mr. Bergman noticed the audience growing restless. Some began to tackle their e-mail inboxes, others planned vacations, and a significant number of them surfed their phones.
The manager’s dense PowerPoint slide deck with bulleted lists, numbers and graphs, coupled with the non-stop cadence of his voice, failed to deliver any value whatsoever to either him or his audience.
“If you want your employees to be engaged and productive, stop torturing them by making them sit in front of PowerPoint presentations,” says Mr. Bergman, author of Five Steps to Conquer Death by PowerPoint, and One Bucket at a Time. “There’s a simple path forward. Separate the written word from the spoken word to communicate most effectively. Anything that gets in the way of the listening process should be eliminated.”
Need proof that it’s important? Mangled communication via PowerPoint may have resulted in the death of seven astronauts in 2003.
Edward R. Tufte, professor emeritus of political science, statistics, and computer science at Yale, analyzed several pieces of communications by NASA to study how PowerPoint’s cognitive style can affect engineering analysis with an in-depth look at the 2003 destruction of space shuttle Columbia and the death of the astronauts aboard.
Some 82 seconds after liftoff, a piece of insulation weighing 757 grams detached from the liquid fluid tank and hit the shuttle’s left wing. The insulation broke through the wing’s thermal protection.
During re-entry, Columbia burned up because the compromised thermal protection could not withstand the high temperature. The only evidence of a possible problem was a video sequence showing “something hit the wing somewhere,” noted Prof. Tufte.
To help NASA assess the threat of the initial wing damage, Boeing officials created three reports, totalling 28 PowerPoint slides. The reports presented “mixed” readings of the threat because the words were wrapped in some sort of bullet hierarchy. In this case, lower-level bullets mentioned doubts and uncertainties, but the highlighted big-bulleted executive summaries painted an optimistic picture. Based on the reports, NASA remained convinced Columbia was safe to return.
When Prof. Tufte examined a key slide, he noticed it had too much text, multiple bullets and different font sizes, and it was laced with heavy jargon.
He concluded that Boeing’s muddied messages on PowerPoint played a critical part in the mission’s failure.
Besides, Prof. Tufte said, there’s a growing cadre of outspoken critics from army generals and physicists to professors and corporate leaders who are equally disdainful of the ubiquitous …….