PowerPoint of Afghan War Strategy

eldavojohn writes "Disillusioned by PowerPoint at work? Some members of the US Military view it as 'an internal threat.' Marine Corps General James N. Mattis says, 'PowerPoint makes us stupid,' reaching the same conclusion NASA came to back in 2003. But nothing speaks to this more than the spaghetti-bowl PowerPoint slide of the US Military's strategy in the ongoing war in Afghanistan. The slide causes anyone's eyes to glaze over with confusion so much that General McChrystal jokingly stated when he saw it, 'When we understand that slide, we'll have won the war.' At my job, I know that feeling all too well."

Comments

PowerPoint makes us stupid

[ls671]

"PowerPoint makes us stupid"

Does it really take a General to tell us that ? ;-))

Re:PowerPoint makes us stupid

[rliden]

Does removing PowerPoint make the presenter any smarter or the presentation they've done any clearer? Somehow I doubt having it drawn out on paper will make it any easier for the good general to understand. :p

From TFA:

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.”

Commanders say that the slides impart less information than a five-page paper can hold, and that they relieve the briefer of the need to polish writing to convey an analytic, persuasive point.

When I was serving in the US Navy I don't remember over-head presentations from photocopies of "well written briefs" being any more entertaining or any easier to understand. Sometimes the situation or mission is complicated. There isn't anything you can't write on paper that can't be put in a presentation or it's accompanying printed notes. This sounds a lot more like finger pointing due to failure or incompetence in the field than it does a software limitation. I find it ludicrous that the blame is shifted from incapable leadership and poor communication to a software tool (take special note of the third to the last paragraph). I also find it boggling that the US military can't figure out how to use both presentation and word processing tools at the same time. Is there a reason a five page report can't be written to accompany the presentation? And they wonder why upper level logistics are a mess.

Re:PowerPoint makes us stupid

[goombah99]

"PowerPoint makes us stupid"

Does it really take a General to tell us that ? ;-))

It might take a general to say the emperor has no clothes.

Here's a pro tip: increase your font size to almost the headline size. Does your message not fit anymore? then delete it. Use words and figures instead.

The problem with information packed slides is that the audience is momentarily given lots of information but having too little time to parse it won't recall it later. And they won't be able to concentrate on your words either. instead put details in slide notes and include those on a printed out version.

There is one exception to this rule: the military quad chart. But quad charts are intentionally dense because you are supposed to linger on them for a long long time.

One more thing: Always label the axes on a plot dammit. and then always tell people in words what the axes are BEFORE you tell them what the plot says.

Re:PowerPoint makes us stupid

[characterZer0]

No, PowerPoint does not make us stupid.

PowerPoint exposes how stupid we already are. It shows that we have a swirling mess of semi-interconnected ideas and when we try to convey them, all we can produce is a swirling mess of semi-interconnected slides.

Re:PowerPoint makes us stupid

[eln]

Some problems in the world are not bullet-izable.

Damn, talk about a lesson this country badly needs to learn. Oh wait, he was talking about Power Point bullets...never mind.

Re:PowerPoint makes us stupid

[Hizonner]

Um, no.

"Clean" slides are at least as dangerous as cluttered ones.

If your message does not fit on a slide, then don't use a fucking slide.

Some things are too complex to be reduced to bullets. The answer to that is not to bury the complexity in supplemental material that nobody will ever read. All that does is to create the illusion of comprehension... more dangerous than knowing that you don't have a clue. If you know you don't know, you'll either find out, or you'll let somebody else deal with the problem. If you think the problem is simple, but it's not, you'll make stupid decisions.

Don't put up a bunch of "keywords" on a screen to hypnotize the audience. SPEAK to the audience. Flash keywords if you must, but don't leave a slide up there for people to read while they miss the thread of what you're saying, or forget to think about anything that doesn't happen to have fit into the five available lines. And leave yourself some flexibility to respond when they're not getting it, instead of blindly continuing down the track your slides set for you.

Don't waste a lot of time making pretty slides, either. They're basically distracting and misleading. In fact, maybe you should write those keywords on a blackboard.

Is all your information in your slides? Can you say, with a straight face, "read my slides and you'll understand"? Then that's not a presentation. That's what we used to call a "document". Use a document preparation tool for that, not a presentation tool.

Is it too complicated to say in a presentation? Then a document is indeed right for you. Write one. Let people read it. MAKE them read it; don't give them a simplified spoon-fed version that produces false understanding. That's right, people need to actually read and write real text. Can't read and write? Sorry, you don't belong here.

Sure, use charts and graphs. That's what PowerPoint is actually good for. Make sure your analysis and data presentation are respectable, though... you can easily create a graph that gives a thoroughly wrong impression of what's important.

And that Afghanistan slide actually makes a great point. It says "This is complicated, you idiots. Don't knee-jerk". That's a slide I might actually use.

I don't know if this is true

[gyrogeerloose]

but it sure would be great if this were the beginning of the end of unnecessary PowerPoint presentations. I can't think of many times when I saw one that was actually helpful.

Afghanistan victory strategy

[Eunuchswear]

1. bomb Taliban positions with solar powered laptops running Windows7 with powerpoint installed
2. Victory
3. ...
4. Experience horrible unplanned of blow-back.

Knowledge Limited

[SendBot]

That spaghetti slide has a copyright notice at the bottom, "PA Knowledge Limited 2009"

There must be a joke about oxymorons and military intelligence in here somewhere.

Re:Knowledge Limited

[MozeeToby]

Am I the only one to realize that the 'Spaghetti slide' is supposed to be unintelligible? The presentation in question was about how complex a modern, asymmetrical war can be. Each bubble is a single aspect, and each edge is a relationship between two aspects. It's meant to show the overwhelming complexity of the war in Afghanistan, and it does a damn good job of doing that.

best line of TFA

[Anonymous Coward]

Senior officers say the program does come in handy when the goal is not imparting information, as in briefings for reporters.

NASA / Ed Tufte reference

[blakelarson]

A long essay on the evils of PowerPoint by the man, Ed Tufte, regarding the shuttle explosions: http://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=0001yB&topic_id=1

Not bullet-izable

[myrrdyn]

From the article:

General McMaster said in a telephone interview afterward. “Some problems in the world are not bullet-izable.”

Oh, man... the irony

Re:Not bullet-izable

[TheKidWho]

Yeah, some require rockets.

Re:Not bullet-izable

[TubeSteak]

... Thomas X. Hammes, a retired Marine colonel, whose title, "Dumb-Dumb Bullets," underscored criticism of fuzzy bullet points; "accelerate the introduction of new weapons," for instance, does not actually say who should do so.

That's not a weakness of powerpoint, it's a weakness of the presenter.
I've given powerpoint presentations, but they were just the front end of a much deeper paper.
The way I learned to use powerpoint was that it should provide enough information for people to know whether or not they want to read your full paper.

Lt. Gen. David D. McKiernan, who led the allied ground forces in the 2003 invasion of Iraq, grew frustrated when he could not get Gen. Tommy R. Franks, the commander at the time of American forces in the Persian Gulf region, to issue orders that stated explicitly how he wanted the invasion conducted, and why. Instead, General Franks just passed on to General McKiernan the vague PowerPoint slides that he had already shown to Donald H. Rumsfeld, the defense secretary at the time.

Holy. Farking. Shit.
I imagine this is what the presentation looked like:

• Shock and Awe
• ???
• Oil Revenue

To Give The Devil His Due...

[damn_registrars]

I don't think it is fair to blame this directly on Microsoft. There are, after all, other programs available today that allow you to make terrible presentations. If the talk had been done instead in Apple Keynote, OpenOffice, or any other program, it still would have been possible to make massive, mind-numbing, information-lacking, slides.

For that matter, I'm pretty sure the same was possible before we started doing this with software - it was certainly possible with film slides as well.

There's not really a better alternative

[Jeian]

When I was in USAF officer training, all the trainees were required to give several briefings throughout the program. We were told that we could use any visual aids we wanted (to include whiteboard, PowerPoint or... who knows.)

All 144 of us used PowerPoint, simply because it was the easiest way to complement what you were talking about.

Re:There's not really a better alternative

[lwsimon]

But was it the best way?

Re:There's not really a better alternative

[Jahava]

But was it the best way?

It really depends. PowerPoint (and presentation applications in general) offer a very flexible and powerful method for imparting information. You can collect disparate pieces of information together, present it in numerous forms (text, pictures, animations, etc.), and emphasize and accent, among other things. These are all very useful things to do for a variety of situations. The issue with PowerPoint (and office software in general) is the misconceived perception that it should be used by everybody. Some people know how to present, and others do not. Those who do not will make a mess out of anything, including presentation software.

With great power comes great responsibility -- Spider Man

Presentation applications, like any other flexible development environment, carry with them a responsibility that it be used intelligently and purposefully. The ability to display all sorts of information also increases the overall potential complexity of the information. The same generic set of guidelines applies, just like it always has, be it with books, technical papers, charts, graphics, code comments, or any other medium:

• Know your audience - One single presentation cannot effectively address an audience with a wide variety of purposes and backgrounds. The presentation cannot be broken down into chunks that are interesting to only one group at a time. It's a performance, and it should be performed to a captivated audience. It's very easy to cram too much stuff into a single presentation, when multiple targeted presentations would have been effective and clear.
• Use the tool appropriately - A presentation isn't a book club. Anybody can read text, and chances are most of then can read it faster than you can speak it. The presentation software should complement an overall presentation, providing supplemental points, overviews, summaries, accents, and emphasis. If you are going to read the slides verbatim, write a document. Furthermore, slides are not meant to be lingered on. Your audience cannot be expected to stare at a projection for 30 minutes to absorb things, nor should you ask that of them. If such deep supplemental material is needed for your presentation, distribute it beforehand or offer printouts so the audience can take it at their own pace.
• Be purposeful - Every element of a presentation should have a purpose. Additional effects are (minimally) distracting and (potentially) disruptive to your overall mission of imparting information. If a slide transition doesn't increase the clarity of your message, it should not be there.
• etc...

... I could go on, but you get the point. When used correctly, presentation software can be very powerful and useful. There is no inherent aspect of it that dumbs down presentations or people. The compulsion to "mutilate data" is something that only stems from a lack of understanding of how to present that data in the first place. Give an stupid person a tool, and he'll use it stupidly.

I know that slide...

[Morphine007]

... and it has nothing to do with the complexity of the STRATEGY.... it's meant to give commanders an indication of the insanely-complex interrelations between various factors/actions. It's actually designed to represent the SITUATION in Afghanistan and to illustrate that simple notions of cause and effect aren't quite as simple as you'd like to believe. The slide is nothing more than a model of a very complex situation.... and it's actually a damned good one too.

Check out the larger version of the picture and take a look at some of the headings.

Look at the top right of the dark blue portion, where it says "targeted strikes", if you start following some of the arrows, you see (as you should expect) that targeted strikes will have an effect on "Insurgent Damages and Casualties" and that such an effect will also have an effect on "Fear of ANSF/Coalition Repercussions", which will also have an effect on "Insurgent recruiting/manpower".

There's no description of strategy there, and if you sat down and tried to think about the repercussions of specific actions taken in an area filled with insurgents and a populace that is sometimes sympathetic and sometimes not sympathetic to both the coalition and insurgents, a lot of the interrelations would seem pretty obvious - ie. if you spend too much effort killing insurgents, you run the risk of increasing their ability to recruit, because the population will begin to fear and resent you.

Don't look at the slide as a whole... just look for an entry on the slide that represents an action, and follow the arrows which show what the effects of that action are.

Re:I know that slide...

[Chris Burke]

Don't look at the slide as a whole... just look for an entry on the slide that represents an action, and follow the arrows which show what the effects of that action are.

No, don't do that, because each line in and of itself is simplified, and doesn't tell you anything you shouldn't have already known if you weren't being overly simplistic yourself. As you say, it's obvious. So what's the point of looking at the obvious and simplistic as represented in such a tangled mess?

Look at the slide as a whole. What's the message? "The situation in Afghanistan is a network of interrelated feedback loops vastly too complicated to be conveyed in a single slide". That's the only real information this slide conveys.

I could actually see this slide being highly useful if displayed to the right people. People who are involved in policy but have too simple an idea of the war. "Oh good, I'm going to have the war explained in a powerpoint slide," they say, thinking of typical PP presentations they've seen. The bam, up pops that tangled mess. "Whoa, this is way more complicated than I thought!" And there you go. Message imparted.

PowerPoint?

[LarryRiedel]

But nothing speaks to this more than the spaghetti-bowl PowerPoint slide of the US Military's strategy in the ongoing war in Afghanistan.

Projecting a diagram onto a screen does not make the diagram a PowerPoint slide. The complexity of that diagram has nothing to do with PowerPoint.